Detection of mental stress due to oral academic examination via ultra-short-term HRV analysis

Mental stress may cause cognitive dysfunctions, cardiovascular disorders and depression. Mental stress detection via short-term Heart Rate Variability (HRV) analysis has been widely explored in the last years, while ultra-short term (less than 5 minutes) HRV has been not. This study aims to detect mental stress using linear and non-linear HRV features extracted from 3 minutes ECG excerpts recorded from 42 university students, during oral examination (stress) and at rest after a vacation. HRV features were then extracted and analyzed according to the literature using validated software tools. Statistical and data mining analysis were then performed on the extracted HRV features. The best performing machine learning method was the C4.5 tree algorithm, which discriminated between stress and rest with sensitivity, specificity and accuracy rate of 78%, 80% and 79% respectively.