EmotionO+: Physiological signals knowledge representation and emotion reasoning model for mental health monitoring

Emotion is an important indicator of depressive conditions. Emotion recognition based on physiological signals such as electroencephalogram (EEG) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) has gained significant attraction in healthcare domain research. Sharing of physiological signal data related to emotional response between different healthcare systems has the potential to benefit both laboratory-based healthcare research and 'real-world' clinical practice. However, management and distribution of the data presents significant challenges; addressing these challenges requires advanced tools for data representation, mining and integration. In this paper we propose such a tool which contains an ontology model called EmotionO+ and rules set based on EEG, which is obtained by random forest algorithm to predict emotional state. It presents not only an effective method to enable semantic representation of the EEG and fNIRS data, but also an emotion knowledge mining tool. Results using EEG data in the eNTERFACE'06 dataset show an accuracy for our proposed model of 99.11% as compared to 97.8% for competing methods using the C4.5 algorithm. The experimental results demonstrate that the posited approach is potentially usable for early stage prediction and intervention for depressive disorders.