Automated mental stress recognition through mobile thermal imaging

Mental stress is a critical problem in our modern society. This form of stress strongly affects our well being, and technology is needed to help us to manage health problems. The ability to automatically recognize a person's mental stress can be fundamental in supporting stress and health management. This research focuses on the use of mobile thermal imaging, a new and less explored sensor, to merge the measurement of multiple physiological signatures into one sensor and to build a reliable mental stress automatic recognition model. Mobile thermal imaging has greater potentials for real-world applications given that it is small and light weight, and requires low computation cost. To make mobile thermal imaging a robust multimodal stress sensor, we have so far contributed: i) a new robust respiration tracking method; and ii) a novel respiration-based automatic stress recognition model that works in ubiquitous settings. We are currently investigating new thermal signatures from underexplored body regions (i.e. trapezius muscle) and formulating a research framework to fuse multiple thermal signatures for more reliable stress recognition outcomes.