Measurement of Stress Level during Calculation Task with EEG

Abstract

At present, people live by suffering from strong stresses in the complex society system. It is said that stresses relates to lifestyle related disease and mental disease. These days, stress healing methods for promoting effect of stress like color therapies which affect human senses, are becoming available to be used at a hospital and a nursing home. However, there was little study about real time measurement of stress level which is useful for constructing effective stress healing system. In this study, we tried to verify the possibility of real time stress measurement by using information of EEG. In our experiment, EEG was recorded while subjects were suffering from stress of calculation task and relaxing. The stress level was measured by questionnaire which is non real time subjective stress measurement method and also by salivary amylase activity which is non real time objective stress measurement method simultaneously. As a result, the correlation between normalized salivary amylase activity and normalized power spectrum of beta band of EEG showed middle intensity and the possibility of real time stress measurement with EEG was clarified.