Machine Learning based Stress Detection using Keyboard Typing Behavior

Abstract

Emotion detection is one of those areas where technological advances have brought about significant changesin the human lifestyle. During COVID-19 pandemic, due to the work from home culture, use of computers and laptop was suddenly increased. Introduction of digital environments gave it a whole new dimension. Emotion detection is a virtual or computerized way to detect stress. People suffer from various kinds of stress in day to day activities and it is directly connected to their performance. The stress factor can be expressed through a number of ways and human behavior. The way in which humans interact with the computer can reveal the emotional state of the user, mainly the stress. Keyboard typing behavior or characteristics can be used for stress detection. This paper focuses on understanding typing behaviour of human and indicate their stress level. Relevant features are extracted from typing behavior of a user and used for training machine learning models for detection of stress. K-Nearest Neighbor algorithm gave highest accuracy of 84.21% with dimensionality reduction approach.