Robust stress detection from wearable ECG using subject-specific normalization and stacking ensemble learning

Driven by the rising prevalence of mental health issues, this study proposes an automated stress monitoring system using wearable ECG signals. Designed for personal medical applications, the framework overcomes individual physiological variability by combining subject-specific normalization with a multi-domain feature extraction strategy encompassing HRV, P-Q-R-S-T morphology, and ECG-derived respiration (EDR). The classification model utilizes a Stacking Ensemble architecture integrating XGBoost, Random Forest, and SVM. Evaluated on the standard WESAD dataset, the proposed framework achieves high accuracy, significantly outperforming baseline single models. These findings demonstrate its robust capability for real-time stress monitoring on personal wearable devices.