Assessing mental stress based on smartphone sensing data: An empirical study

Mental stress is a critical factor affecting one's physical and mental well-being. At the early stage, the effect of stress is often underestimated, while it usually leads to serious issue Lateran. 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 embedded with a rich set of sensors, which can capture people's context, such as movement, sound, location and so on, it is an alternative way to access people's behavior by smartphones. Through an empirical study, this paper proposes an automatic and non-intrusive stress detection framework based on smartphone sensing data. First, we construct various discriminative features from multi-modality phone sensing data, in which both absolute and relative features are considered to make the model more personalized. Then, to tackle the challenge of label insufficiency, we further develop a co-training based method for stress level classification. Finally, we evaluate our model based on an open dataset, and the experimental results verify its advantages over other baselines.