A Hybrid Agent System to Detect Stress Using Emotions and Social Media Data to Provide Coping Methodologies

Abstract

Final year undergraduates in Sri Lanka are more likely to experience high levels of stress due to the high competition in the education system. Living with high levels of stress has the possibility of putting a person’s entire well-being at a great risk. Today more and more students are suffering from various levels of stress. Too much stress will bring a variety of physical and psychological problems including anxiety, depression and even suicide to growing youths. Traditional face-to-face stress detection and relief methods do not work, confronted with undergraduates who are reluctant to express their negative emotions to the people in real life. In this paper, the authors present undergraduates-oriented intelligent chatting system which aims to act as a virtual friend to listen, understand, comfort, encourage, and guide stressful undergraduates to pour out their bad feelings and thus release the stress by suggesting stress coping mechanisms to follow and to be guided. Our user study demonstrates that this system is effective on sensing and coping with undergraduates stress.