Mental Stress Assessment Approach Based on Smartphone Sensing Data

Mental stress is harmful on individuals’ physical and mental well-being. It is often easy to be overlooked in the early stage, leading to serious problems. Therefore, it is crucial to detect stress before it evolves into severe problems. Traditional stress detection methods are based on either questionnaires or professional devices, which are time-consuming, costly and intrusive. With the popularity of smartphones with various embedded sensors, which can capture users’ context data contains movement, sound, location and so on, it is an alternative way to access users’ behavior by smartphones, which is less intrusive. This paper proposes an automatic and non-intrusive stress detection approach based on mobile sensing data captured by smartphones. By extracting reasonable features from the perceived data, a more efficient psychological stress assessment method is proposed. First, we generate lots of features represent users’ behavior and explore the correlation between mobile sensing data and stress, then identify discriminative features. Second, we further develop a semi-supervised learning based stress detection model. Specifically, we use techniques such as co-training and random forest to deal with insufficient data. Finally, we evaluate our model based on the StudentLife dataset, and the experimental results verify the advantages of our approach over other baselines.