Depresjon dataset and biological question

What was measured

Participants wore a wrist Actiwatch that stored activity counts once per minute. The public DEPRESJON release includes:

• 23 people with unipolar or bipolar depression (condition)

• 32 controls (control)

• About two weeks of recording per person (exact length varies; see days)

• A timestamp and an activity count on each minute

Score fields are stored on those minute rows and repeat for a given person: gender, age (age range), edu (education), inpatient, madrs1 and madrs2, plus related fields (afftype, melanch, marriage, work).

Each person was recorded on their own dates. A control file may fall in a different month than a condition file. Read each person on their own timeline, by hour and weekday, rather than by a shared calendar day.

Original collection: Berge / Fasmer group, Haukeland University Hospital (Bergen, Norway). Public packaging: Garcia-Ceja et al., MMSys 2018.

What the study reported

The study these recordings come from reported lower daytime activity in depression than in controls, and a larger gap on weekends than on weekdays.

Files in this module

depresjon_minute.csv.gz — one row per person-minute after trimming each recording to the first days listed for that person (the window used in the dataset paper). Columns include person_id, group, timestamp, activity, days, and the score fields above.

Rebuild with python prepare_depresjon.py. Terms: LICENSE.md (CC BY-NC 4.0; citation required).

Question for the module

In this table, is activity lower in the condition group than in controls, and does weekday versus weekend change the comparison?

A minute is not the sample size. Neither is a single hour treated as an independent subject. The person is the unit: the same person contributes both weekday and weekend activity. Use hour-of-day and day-of-week summaries to see the pattern, then aggregate to the person before a test.

People do not share one weekly schedule. A person who is active on Monday will not look like a person whose active day is Tuesday, and a group average can blur that.

Why this dataset

Many measurements sit inside each person. The Data Science Agent can propose plots and tests. You decide which summaries respect the design, and you interpret the figure.