Towards Ambulatory Mental Stress Measurement from Physiological Parameters

Ambulatory mental stress monitoring requires long-term physiological measurements. This paper presents a data collection protocol for ambulatory recording of physiological parameters for stress measurement purposes. We present a wearable sensor system for ambulatory recording of ECG, EMG, respiration and skin conductance. The system also records various context parameters: acceleration, temperature and relative humidity. We show that the sensor system is capable of long-term, noninvasive, nonobtrusive, wireless physiological monitoring. We also show some preliminary results of a stress estimation method. These results reveal already a number of context-related issues we will have to take into account in future work. The presented sensor system enables physiological and context data collection and further development of personalized real-time stress detection algorithms.