A Facial and Vocal Expression Based Comprehensive Framework for Real-Time Student Stress Monitoring in an IoT-Fog-Cloud Environment

In this era of digital and modern education, the existence of psychological stress on students cannot be denied. The surplus aggregation of the stress may lead to different problems like a decline in student grade (performance), an increase of violence in behavior, and even more extreme cases. The advent of Information Communication and Technology (ICT) and its tools opened the doors to innovations that facilitate interactions among things and humans. In this utilization, the paper proposes a novel, IoT-aware student-centric stress monitoring and real-time alert generating framework to predict student stress index in a particular context. In elaboration, we respectively used extended VGG16, Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory network (Bi -LSTM), and Multinomial Naïve Bayes techniques to generate the scores of emotions from student facial expressions, speech pitch, and content of student speech at the cloud layer. Specifically, the model aims to classify the stress events as normal or abnormal on basis of the overall emotion of the students’ physiological data readings. The activation of the abnormal event in case of higher values for negative emotions like stress, fear, sadness, disgust, etc.; a stern alert is sent to the student, coordinators, and caretakers. This proposed framework will ultimately be a great tool that will support the education institutions, students, their parents, and guardians to get a real-time alert on students’ overall emotions. The prior knowledge of stress accumulated on the mind of the student will help in overcoming major problems of student dropout, decrease student academic performance, and tackle the stress situation that may lead to the student attempting suicide.