Abstract
Acute stress is a physiological condition that may induce several neural dysfunctions with a significant impact on life quality. Accordingly, it would be important to monitor stress in everyday life unobtrusively and inexpensively. In this paper, we presented a new methodological pipeline to recognize acute stress conditions using electrodermal activity (EDA) exclusively. Particularly, we combined a rigorous and robust model (cvxEDA) for EDA processing and decomposition, with an algorithm based on a support vector machine to classify the stress state at a single-subject level. Indeed, our method, based on a single sensor, is robust to noise, applies a rigorous phasic decomposition, and implements an unbiased multiclass classification. To this end, we analyzed the EDA of 65 volunteers subjected to different acute stress stimuli induced by a modified version of the Trier Social Stress Test. Our results show that stress is successfully detected with an average accuracy of 94.62%. Besides, we proposed a further 4-class pattern recognition system able to distinguish between non-stress condition and three different stressful stimuli achieving an average accuracy as high as 75.00%. These results, obtained under controlled conditions, are the first step towards applications in ecological scenarios.
Highlights
Physiological stress response provides the organism with the required alertness, energy, physiological regulation, and immunological activation that help the individual to survive in critical cases
We proposed a pattern recognition system based on cvxEDA model and SVM algorithm able to automatically recognize stress at a single-subject level using only electrodermal activity (EDA) correlates
This study is a further demonstration of reliable monitoring of acute stress levels using physiological signals and responds to the growing request to control this alarming disorder in a free-living condition
Summary
Physiological stress response provides the organism with the required alertness, energy, physiological regulation, and immunological activation that help the individual to survive in critical cases. According to the American Psychological Association, acute stress is the immediate physiological response to demands and pressures of the recent past as well as those anticipated in the near future [8] These can derive from critical situations such as athletic performance, personal losses, traumatic accidents, or abrupt environmental changes. If acute episodes proliferate and persist as in a chronic condition even the milder stress symptoms can cause extensive damage, strongly reducing the quality of life [10] It has been identified as a risk factor for hypertension and coronary disease [9], [12], irritable bowel syndrome, gastroesophageal reflux disease [13], and mental diseases, e.g., anxiety disorder and depression [14]. The development of early stress-detection methods would be extremely important
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