A Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Model for Depression Severity Detection Based on Audio and Video Signals

In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has increasingly utilized speech and video signals for emotion recognition, facial recognition, and depression detection, playing a crucial role in mental health assessment. However, the AI-driven research on detecting depression severity remains limited, and the existing models are often too large for lightweight deployment, restricting their real-time monitoring capabilities, especially in resource-constrained environments. To address these challenges, this study proposes a lightweight and accurate multimodal method for detecting depression severity, aiming to provide effective support for smart healthcare systems. Specifically, we design a multimodal detection network based on speech and video signals, enhancing the recognition of depression severity by optimizing the cross-modal fusion strategy. The model leverages Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks to capture long-term dependencies in speech and visual sequences, effectively extracting dynamic features associated with depression. Considering the behavioral differences of respondents when interacting with human versus robotic interviewers, we train two separate sub-models and fuse their outputs using a Mixture of Experts (MOE) framework capable of modeling uncertainty, thereby suppressing the influence of low-confidence experts. In terms of the loss function, the traditional Mean Squared Error (MSE) is replaced with Negative Log-Likelihood (NLL) to better model prediction uncertainty and enhance robustness. The experimental results show that the improved AI model achieves an accuracy of 83.86% in depression severity recognition. The model’s floating-point operations per second (FLOPs) reached 0.468 GFLOPs, with a parameter size of only 0.52 MB, demonstrating its compact size and strong performance. These findings underscore the importance of emotion and facial recognition in AI applications for mental health, offering a promising solution for real-time depression monitoring in resource-limited environments.