Hierarchical deep neural network for mental stress state detection using IoT based biomarkers

Affective state recognition at an early stage can help in mood stabilization, stress and depression management for mental well-being. Pro-active and remote mental healthcare warrants the use of various biomarkers to detect the affective mental state of the individual by evaluating the daily activities. With the easy accessibility of IoT-based sensors for healthcare, observable and quantifiable characteristics of our body, physiological changes in the body can be measured and tracked using various wearable devices. This work puts forward a model for mental stress state detection using sensor-based bio-signals. A multi-level deep neural network with hierarchical learning capabilities of convolution neural network is proposed. Multivariate time-series data consisting of both wrist-based and chest-based sensor bio-signals is trained using a hierarchy of networks to generate high-level features for each bio-signal feature. A model-level fusion strategy is proposed to combine the high-level features into one unified representation and classify the stress states into three categories as baseline, stress and amusement. The model is evaluated on the WESAD benchmark dataset for mental health and compares favourably to state-of-the-art approaches giving a superlative performance accuracy of 87.7%. (C) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.