A Sensor Technology Survey for a Stress-Aware Trading Process

The role of the global economy is fundamentally important to our daily lives. The stock markets reflect the state of the economy on a daily basis. Traders are the workers within the stock markets who deal with numbers, statistics, company analysis, news, and many other factors that influence the economy in real time. However, while making significant decisions within their workplace, traders must also deal with their own emotions. In fact, traders have one of the most stressful professional occupations. This survey merges current knowledge about stress effects and sensor technology by reviewing, comparing, and highlighting relevant existing research and commercial products that are available on the market. This assessment is made in order to establish how sensor technology can support traders to avoid poor decision making during the trading process. The purpose of this paper is: 1) to review the studies about the impact of stress on the decision-making process and on biological stress parameters that are applied in sensor design; 2) to compare different ways to measure stress by using sensors that are currently available in the market according to basic biometric principles under trading context; and 3) to suggest new directions in the use of sensor technology in stock markets.