Screening for Depression and Anxiety Using a Nonverbal Working Memory Task in a Sample of Older Brazilians: Observational Study of Preliminary Artificial Intelligence Model Transferability
Authors: Georgescu Alexandra Livia , Cummins Nicholas , Molimpakis Emilia , Giacomazzi Eduardo , Rodrigues Marczyk Joana , Goria Stefano 
Published: October 2024

Background

Anxiety and depression represent prevalent yet frequently undetected mental health concerns within the older population. The challenge of identifying these conditions presents an opportunity for artificial intelligence (AI)–driven, remotely available, tools capable of screening and monitoring mental health. A critical criterion for such tools is their cultural adaptability to ensure effectiveness across diverse populations.

Objective

This study aims to illustrate the preliminary transferability of two established AI models designed to detect high depression and anxiety symptom scores. The models were initially trained on data from a nonverbal working memory game (1- and 2-back tasks) in a dataset by thymia, a company that develops AI solutions for mental health and well-being assessments, encompassing over 6000 participants from the United Kingdom, United States, Mexico, Spain, and Indonesia. We seek to validate the models’ performance by applying it to a new dataset comprising older Brazilian adults, thereby exploring its transferability and generalizability across different demographics and cultures.

Methods

A total of 69 Brazilian participants aged 51-92 years old were recruited with the help of Laços Saúde, a company specializing in nurse-led, holistic home care. Participants received a link to the thymia dashboard every Monday and Thursday for 6 months. The dashboard had a set of activities assigned to them that would take 10-15 minutes to complete, which included a 5-minute game with two levels of the n-back tasks. Two Random Forest models trained on thymia data to classify depression and anxiety based on thresholds defined by scores of the Patient Health Questionnaire (8 items) (PHQ-8) ≥10 and those of the Generalized Anxiety Disorder Assessment (7 items) (GAD-7) ≥10, respectively, were subsequently tested on the Laços Saúde patient cohort.

Results

The depression classification model exhibited robust performance, achieving an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.78, a specificity of 0.69, and a sensitivity of 0.72. The anxiety classification model showed an initial AUC of 0.63, with a specificity of 0.58 and a sensitivity of 0.64. This performance surpassed a benchmark model using only age and gender, which had AUCs of 0.47 for PHQ-8 and 0.53 for GAD-7. After recomputing the AUC scores on a cross-sectional subset of the data (the first n-back game session), we found AUCs of 0.79 for PHQ-8 and 0.76 for GAD-7.

Conclusions

This study successfully demonstrates the preliminary transferability of two AI models trained on a nonverbal working memory task, one for depression and the other for anxiety classification, to a novel sample of older Brazilian adults. Future research could seek to replicate these findings in larger samples and other cultural contexts.