Abstract

Stress detection is becoming a popular field in machine learning and this study focuses on recognizing stress using the sensors of commercially available smartwatches. In most of the previous studies, stress detection is based on partly or fully on electrodermal activity sensor (EDA). However, if the final aim of the study is to build a smartwatch application, using EDA signal is problematic as the smartwatches currently in the market do not include sensor to measure EDA signal. Therefore, this study surveys what sensors the smartwatches currently in the market include, and which of them 3rd party developers have access to. Moreover, it is studied how accurately stress can be detected user-independently using different sensor combinations. In addition, it is studied how detection rates vary between study subjects and what kind of effect window size has to the recognition rates. All of the experiments are based on publicly available WESAD dataset. The results show that, indeed, EDA signal is not necessary when detecting stress user-independently, and therefore, commercial smartwatches can be used for recognizing stress when the used window length is big enough. However, it is also noted that recognition rate varies a lot between the study subjects.