Bio-Signal Acquisition Analysis for Stress Level Determination

Abstract

Stress and illness have a complex relationship, that’s why stress is considered a precursor of illness, so it is important to study about it to reduce deceases and even prevent early death. In this work we employ two methods to measure stress: a subjective one known in the literature as Depress, Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS) and an objective one proposed here based on the acquisition and analysis of certain bio-signals. The former is based on tests about how people feel, and the latter is based on bio-signal acquisition of temperature and galvanic skin response. In this paper, we use the Depress, Anxiety and Stress Scale method on its reduced version of 21 items as a reference to compare objective methods based on measurements of temperature and galvanic skin response of undergraduate students of High and Low Stress levels during three different conditions (i.e., closed eyes, open eyes and relaxation). We found that inter-individual variability of temperature and galvanic skin response does not allows us to show significant differences for subjects having low or high stress levels. In the other hand, for an intra-subject analysis differences among temperature or galvanic skin response shows significant differences between subjects having low or high stress levels.