Abstract
Exposure to mental stress for long period leads to serious accidents and health problems. To avoid negative consequences on health and safety, it is very important to detect mental stress at its early stages, i.e., when it is still limited to acute or episodic stress. In this study, we developed an experimental protocol to induce two different levels of stress by utilizing a mental arithmetic task with time pressure and negative feedback as the stressors. We assessed the levels of stress on 22 healthy subjects using frontal electroencephalogram (EEG) signals, salivary alpha-amylase level (AAL), and multiple machine learning (ML) classifiers. The EEG signals were analyzed using a fusion of functional connectivity networks estimated by the Phase Locking Value (PLV) and temporal and spectral domain features. A total of 210 different features were extracted from all domains. Only the optimum multi-domain features were used for classification. We then quantified stress levels using statistical analysis and seven ML classifiers. Our result showed that the AAL level was significantly increased (p < 0.01) under stress condition in all subjects. Likewise, the functional connectivity network demonstrated a significant decrease under stress, p < 0.05. Moreover, we achieved the highest stress classification accuracy of 93.2% using the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. Other classifiers produced relatively similar results.
Highlights
Mental stress has become a catchphrase nowadays, affecting almost everyone, due to the increasing demands in the workplace, life burdens, changing lifestyles, and technological interventions
To address the aforementioned limitation, this study aims to investigate the fusion of functional connectivity network features with cortical activation features from the time and frequency domains to detect mental stress in order to aid in the development of wearable devices
The significant channels of Hjorth complexity and mobility were located in the prefrontal cortex (‘Fp1’, ‘F3’, and ‘F4’), while Hjorth activity had only two significant channels that were selected from the left frontal cortex of (‘F7’ and ‘F3’)
Summary
Mental stress has become a catchphrase nowadays, affecting almost everyone, due to the increasing demands in the workplace, life burdens, changing lifestyles, and technological interventions. The long-term effects of stress impact health issues, such as heart disease, obesity, diabetes, stroke, and depression [1,2,3], but have economic consequences too. Researchers are trying to detect mental stress at its early stage to prevent it from becoming chronic. The evaluation of human psychological stress usually performed using subjective or objective measurement methods. The subjective stress assessment methods used psychological assessment approaches, such as a clinical interview and psychological-based questionnaires, such as the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) [5,6], Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) [7,8,9], State-Trait
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