Postpartum depression prediction through pregnancy data analysis for emotion-aware smart systems

Emotion-aware computing represents an evolution in machine learning enabling systems and devices process to interpret emotional data to recognize human behavior changes. As emotion-aware smart systems evolve, there is an enormous potential for increasing the use of specialized devices that can anticipate life-threatening conditions facilitating an early response model for health complications. At the same time, applications developed for diagnostic and therapy services can support conditions recognition (as depression, for instance). Hence, this paper proposes an improved algorithm for emotion-aware smart systems, capable for predicting the risk of postpartum depression in women suffering from hypertensive disorders during pregnancy through biomedical and sociodemographic data analysis. Results show that ensemble classifiers represent a leading solution concerning predicting psychological disorders related to pregnancy. Merging novel technologies based on IoT, cloud computing, and big data analytics represent a considerable advance in monitoring complex diseases for emotion-aware computing, such as postpartum depression.