A Photoplethysmography (PPG) Sensor based Stress Level Monitoring System for Undergraduate Students of Technical Education

With each passing day, an increasing number of students are found dealing with significant levels of mental stress, which are primarily induced by socio-academic factors. Of late this has become severe among students of technical education in India. Stress significantly impacts various cognitive processes in students’ minds, including thinking, learning, memory, awareness of their surroundings, and social intelligence. It holds great relevance in modern educational systems and the holistic development of students. Therefore, analyzing student stress levels becomes crucial in understanding their overall well-being and facilitating effective educational practices. In this work, we explore human physiological signal in form of Photoplethysmograph (PPG) for detection of mental stress levels in students. Our target participants are undergraduate students of technical institutions of national importance in India, aged between 17-23. PPG signals are used to generate heart rate data, collected using the Polar OH1+ device, an optical heart rate monitor worn as an armband, and paired with smartphone applications such as ‘Polar Flow’ and ‘Polar Beat’. The low-cost, affordable and non-intrusive nature of this device makes it a suitable candidate for usage by students. We identify relevant features can be extracted using PPG sensor and can be proven to be relevant in this problem. Finally a classification model is built on the identified features which enables stress level detection in students with an accuracy of over 86%, as evident from our experimental results.