Effects of noisy sounds on human stress using ECG signals: An empirical study

In this paper, we explore the effects of noisy sounds (i.e. auditory stressor) on human stress using electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. The noisy sounds utilized in this study include: sound of car horn, children crying, siren, drilling and from a construction site. Essentially, the ECG signals are represented by eight heart rate variability features which are commonly utilized in human stress related literature. A statistical significance test is then performed per feature per sound so that those effective features for detecting human stress caused by the noisy sounds can be localized. Our empirical results performed using an in-house database (ten minutes of ECG signals from seventeen healthy subjects), showed that some of the noisy sounds cause human stress. The results also reveal that frequency-domain features contain more stress related information caused by the noisy sounds than that of time-domain and geometric features.