title: Stress Detection Using Low Cost Heart Rate Sensors.
abstract: The automated detection of stress is a central problem for ambient assisted living solutions. The paper presents the concepts and results of two studies targeted at stress detection with a low cost heart rate sensor, a chest belt. In the device validation study ( n = 5), we compared heart rate data and other features from the belt to those measured by a gold standard device to assess the reliability of the sensor. With simple synchronization and data cleaning algorithm, we were able to select highly (>97%) correlated, low average error (2.2%) data segments of considerable length from the chest data for further processing. The protocol for the clinical study ( n = 46) included a relax phase followed by a phase with provoked mental stress, 10 minutes each. We developed a simple method for the detection of the stress using only three time-domain features of the heart rate signal. The method produced accuracy of 74.6%, sensitivity of 75.0%, and specificity of 74.2%, which is impressive compared to the performance of two state-of-the-art methods run on the same data. Since the proposed method uses only time-domain features, it can be efficiently implemented on mobile devices.
authors.affiliation: Medical Informatics R&D Centre, University of Pannonia, Egyetem Utca 10, Veszprém 8200, Hungary.
authors.forename: Mario
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Salai
authors.affiliation: Medical Informatics R&D Centre, University of Pannonia, Egyetem Utca 10, Veszprém 8200, Hungary.
authors.forename: István
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Vassányi
authors.affiliation: Medical Informatics R&D Centre, University of Pannonia, Egyetem Utca 10, Veszprém 8200, Hungary.
authors.forename: István
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Kósa
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000465:Algorithms; D005260:Female; D006339:Heart Rate / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; D055815:Young Adult