Investigation of Machine Learning Techniques and Sensing Devices for Mental Stress Detection

Nowadays, stress has become a major cause of many diseases. According to the World Health organization, stress affects about 280 million people globally (i.e.) 3.8% of the population. Early identification of stress is important to prevent its negative impacts on people and is therefore an important step in the service of humanity and health care. These days, smart devices have become an important part of our lives and it achieved a huge amount of usage. This led to the query of whether smartphones and wearable sensors can identify and prevent stress. Although there are numerous works on mental stress detection that exist in controlled laboratory settings, the number of methods for stress detection in everyday life is inadequate. A variety of studies have been conducted to establish an association between stressful events and human responses using diverse psychological, physiological, physical, and behavioral measures. This paper conducts an integrated review of human stress detection and it provides an analysis of strategies and techniques that have been proposed for detecting human stress. This study also focuses on the prospective strategies, advantages, and challenges of mental stress detection using machine learning (ML), and wearable sensors.