Chen, WenwanSabharwal, AshutoshTaylor, EricaPatel, Ankit B.Moukaddam, Nidal2021-09-212021-09-212021Chen, Wenwan, Sabharwal, Ashutosh, Taylor, Erica, et al.. "Privacy-Preserving Social Ambiance Measure From Free-Living Speech Associates With Chronic Depressive and Psychotic Disorders." <i>Frontiers in Psychiatry,</i> 12, (2021) Frontiers: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.670020.https://hdl.handle.net/1911/111389A social interaction consists of contributions by the individual, the environment and the interaction between the two. Ideally, to enable effective assessment and interventions for social isolation, an issue inherent to depressive and psychotic illnesses, the isolation must be identified in real-time and at an individual level. However, research addressing sociability deficits is largely focused on determining loneliness, rather than isolation, and lacks focus on the richness of the social environment the individual revolves in. In this paper, We describe the development of an automated, objective and privacy-preserving Social Ambiance Measure (SAM) that converts unconstrained audio recordings collected from wrist-worn audio-bands into four levels, ranging from none to active. The ambiance levels are based on the number of simultaneous speakers, which is a proxy for overall social activity in the environment. Results show that social ambiance patterns and time spent at each ambiance level differed between participants with depressive or psychotic disorders and healthy controls. Individuals with depression/psychosis spent less time in diverse environments and less time in moderate/active ambiance levels. Moreover, social ambiance patterns are found associated with the severity of self-reported depression, anxiety symptoms and personality traits. The results in this paper suggest that objectively measured social ambiance can be used as a marker of sociability, and holds potential to be leveraged to better understand social isolation and develop effective interventions for sociability challenges, thus improving mental health outcomes.engThis is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.Journal articlefpsyt-12-670020https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.670020