Discovering fuzzy association rules from patient´s daily text messages to diagnose melancholia

With the constant stress from work load and daily life people may show symptoms of melancholia. However, most people are reluctant to describe it or may not know that they already have it. In this paper a novel system is proposed to discover clues from patient´s interaction with psychologist or from self-recorded voice or text messages. A user friendly interface is provided for patients to input text messages or record a voice file by mobile phones or other input devices. A speech-to-text conversion software is used to convert voice mails to simple text files in advance. Based on the text files, a data mining model is used to discover frequent keywords mentioned in the text or speech files. The association rules can be used to help psychologists diagnose patients´ degree of melancholia. Experimental results show that the proposed system can effectively discover melancholia keywords.