Evaluation of Commercial-Off-The-Shelf Wrist Wearables to Estimate Stress on Students

Summary

A protocol to evaluate solutions based on commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) wrist wearables to estimate stress in students is proposed. The protocol is carried out in two phases, an initial laboratory-based stress induction test, and a monitoring stage taking place in the classroom while the student is performing academic activities.

Abstract

Wearable commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) devices have become popular during the last years to monitor sports activities, primarily among young people. These devices include sensors to gather data on physiological signals such as heart rate, skin temperature or galvanic skin response. By applying data analytics techniques to these kinds of signals, it is possible to obtain estimations of higher-level aspects of human behavior. In the literature, there are several works describing the use of physiological data collected using clinical devices to obtain information on sleep patterns or stress. However, it is still an open question whether data captured using COTS wrist wearables is sufficient to characterize the learners' psychological state in educational settings. This paper discusses a protocol to evaluate stress estimation from data obtained using COTS wrist wearables. The protocol is carried out in two phases. The first stage consists of a controlled laboratory experiment, where a mobile app is used to induce different stress levels in a student by means of a relaxing video, a Stroop Color and Word test, a Paced Auditory Serial Addition test, and a hyperventilation test. The second phase is carried out in the classroom, where stress is analyzed while performing several academic activities, namely attending to theoretical lectures, doing exercises and other individual activities, and taking short tests and exams. In both cases, both quantitative data obtained from COTS wrist wearables and qualitative data gathered by means of questionnaires are considered. This protocol involves a simple and consistent method with a stress induction app and questionnaires, requiring a limited participation of support staff.

Introduction

State-of-the-art wearable technologies are widely available, and their application environments are continuously expanding. We can find in the market many different devices, among which COTS wrist wearables¹, such as smart watches and smart bands, are popular among athletes as a personal physical fitness monitoring tool². By applying data analytic techniques, the data obtained using these devices can be processed to provide indicators such as general physical state, sleep quality or recovery factor. The demonstrated applicability in this area raised interest in the academic community about their possible application to o....

Protocol

All methods described below have been approved by the regional government of Galicia's committee for research ethics of Pontevedra-Vigo-Ourense (reg. code 2017/336). The protocol was implemented for first year students at the School of Telecommunication Engineering - University of Vigo, both in a comfortable laboratory room and in several lectures and practice sessions of a bachelor's degree course on Computer Architectures.

1. Prepare the Devices

1. Connect the smartphone and tablet device to a stable internet connection.
2. Turn on Bluetooth communications in the smartphone.
3. In the smartphone, search in t....

Results

The protocol discussed was put into practice in a Computer Architectures course in the first year of the Telecommunication Engineering degree at the University of Vigo. This course has more than 200 students enrolled who are organized into 10 working groups. To carry out this experiment, students from four of the groups were invited to enroll at the beginning of the academic year. The project attracted considerable interest among the students, and around 30 students volunteered to partici.......

Discussion

COTS wearable devices are among the most popular consumer electronics products available today. These devices are typically used to monitor physical activities, but their capabilities and performance could be of great interest in other areas. In this paper, a protocol to evaluate the use of COTS wearable devices for estimating stress in learning environments is discussed. The definition of such a protocol is especially relevant in order to analyze different solutions involving wearables and machine learning algorithms. T.......

Materials

List of materials used in this article

Name	Company	Catalog Number	Comments
Microsoft Band 2	Microsoft		Wearable
Nexus 5	LG/Google		Smartphone
PhysiologicalSignals	Developed by the paper authors		App to collect data from wearables
StressTest	Developed by the paper authors		App to develop laboraty experiment: Video visualization, Stroop color and word test, paced auditory serial addition test (PASAT) , hyperventilation activity
Quizs	Developed by the paper authors		Questionnaires to collect qualitative data on students’ perception on stress
Server	Developed by the paper authors		Server to store, analyze and display data
Weka application	University of Waikato		Application to process the data using machine learning techniques