Web application to support evidence of individual emotional impact evoked by COVID-19 pandemic restrictions (Preprint)

Abstract

Mental health effects during COVID-19 quarantine need to be handled because patients, relatives, and healthcare workers are living with negative emotional behaviors. The clinical disorders of depression and anxiety are evoking anger, fear, sadness, disgust, and reducing happiness. Therefore, track emotions with the help of psychologists on online consultations –to reduce the risk of contagion– will go a long way in assisting with mental health. The human micro-expressions can describe genuine emotions of people and can be captured by Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) models. But the challenge is to implement it under the poor performance of a part of society's computers and the low speed of internet connection.

This study aimed to create a useful and usable web application to record emotions in a patient’s card in real-time, achieving a small data transfer, and a Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) model with a low computational cost.

To validate the low computational cost premise, firstly, we compare DNN architectures results, collecting the floating-point operations per second (FLOPS), the Number of Parameters (NP) and accuracy from the MobileNet, PeleeNet, Extended Deep Neural Network (EDNN), Inception- Based Deep Neural Network (IDNN) and our proposed Residual mobile-based Network (ResmoNet) model. Secondly, we compare the trained models' results in terms of Main Memory Utilization (MMU) and Response Time to complete the Emotion recognition (RTE). Finally, we design a data transfer that includes the raw data of emotions and the basic text information of the patient. The web application was evaluated with the System Usability Scale (SUS) and a utility questionnaire by psychologists and psychiatrists (experts).

All CNN models were set up using 150 epochs for training and testing comparing the results for each variable in ResmoNet with the best model. It was obtained that ResmoNet has 115,976 NP less than MobileNet, 243,901 FLOPS less than MobileNet, and 5% less accuracy than EDNN (95%). Moreover, ResmoNet used less MMU than any model, only EDNN overcomes ResmoNet in 0.01 seconds for RTE. Finally, with our model, we develop a web application to collect emotions in real-time during a psychological consultation. For data transfer, the patient’s card and raw emotional data have 2 kb with a UTF-8 encoding approximately. Finally, according to the experts, the web application has good usability (73.8 of 100) and utility (3.94 of 5).

A usable and useful web application for psychologists and psychiatrists is presented. This tool includes an efficient and light facial emotion recognition model. Its purpose is to be a complementary tool for diagnostic processes.