Stress Detection Using Frequency Spectrum Analysis of Wrist-Measured Electrodermal Activity

The article deals with the detection of stress using the electrodermal activity (EDA) signal measured at the wrist. We present an approach for feature extraction from EDA. The approach uses frequency spectrum analysis in multiple frequency bands. We evaluate the proposed approach using the 4 Hz EDA signal measured at the wrist in the publicly available Wearable Stress and Affect Detection (WESAD) dataset. Seven existing approaches to stress detection using EDA signals measured by wrist-worn sensors are analysed and the reported results are compared with ours. The proposed approach represents an improvement in accuracy over the other techniques studied. Moreover, we focus on time to detection (TTD) and show that our approach is able to outperform competing techniques, with fewer data points. The proposed feature extraction is computationally inexpensive, thus the presented approach is suitable for use in real-world wearable applications where both short response times and high detection performance are important. We report both binary (stress vs. no stress) as well as three-class (baseline/stress/amusement) results.