Shuffled ECA-Net for stress detection from multimodal wearable sensor data

Background: Recently, stress has been recognized as a key factor in the emergence of individual and social issues. Numerous attempts have been made to develop sensor-augmented psychological stress detection techniques, although existing methods are often impractical or overly subjective. To overcome these limitations, we acquired a dataset utilizing both wireless wearable multimodal sensors and salivary cortisol tests for supervised learning. We also developed a novel deep neural network (DNN) model that maximizes the benefits of sensor fusion.

Method: We devised a DNN involving a shuffled efficient channel attention (ECA) module called a shuffled ECA-Net, which achieves advanced feature-level sensor fusion by considering inter-modality relationships. Through an experiment involving salivary cortisol tests on 26 participants, we acquired multiple bio-signals including electrocardiograms, respiratory waveforms, and electrogastrograms in both relaxed and stressed mental states. A training dataset was generated from the obtained data. Using the dataset, our proposed model was optimized and evaluated ten times through five-fold cross-validation, while varying a random seed.

Results: Our proposed model achieved acceptable performance in stress detection, showing 0.916 accuracy, 0.917 sensitivity, 0.916 specificity, 0.914 F1-score, and 0.964 area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC). Furthermore, we demonstrated that combining multiple bio-signals with a shuffled ECA module can more accurately detect psychological stress.

Conclusions: We believe that our proposed model, coupled with the evidence for the viability of multimodal sensor fusion and a shuffled ECA-Net, would significantly contribute to the resolution of stress-related issues.