Mental stress has been identified as a significant cause of several bodily disorders, such as depression, hypertension, neural and cardiovascular abnormalities. Conventional stress assessment methods are highly subjective and tedious and tend to lack accuracy. Machine-learning (ML)-based computer-aided diagnosis systems can be used to assess the mental state with reasonable accuracy, but they require offline processing and feature extraction, rendering them unsuitable for real-time applications. This paper presents a real-time mental stress assessment approach based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The CNN-based approach afforded real-time mental stress assessment with an accuracy as high as 96%, the sensitivity of 95%, and specificity of 97%. The proposed approach is compared with state-of-the-art ML techniques in terms of accuracy, time utilisation, and quality of features.

Mental stress has been identified as the root cause of various physical and psychological disorders. Therefore, it is crucial to conduct timely diagnosis and assessment considering the severe effects of mental stress. In contrast to other health-related wearable devices, wearable or portable devices for stress assessment have not been developed yet. A major requirement for the development of such a device is a time-efficient algorithm. This study investigates the performance of computer-aided approaches for mental stress assessment. Machine learning (ML) approaches are compared in terms of the time required for feature extraction and classification. After conducting tests on data for real-time experiments, it was observed that conventional ML approaches are time-consuming due to the computations required for feature extraction, whereas a deep learning (DL) approach results in a time-efficient classification due to automated unsupervised feature extraction. This study emphasizes that DL approaches can be used in wearable devices for real-time mental stress assessment.

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