Toward Stress Detection During Gameplay: A Survey

In day-to-day life, stress can arise due to various factors including work–life demands, external situations, and health issues. Stress becomes a concern when it affects a person's mental health, and sometimes it can even result in other chronic illnesses. Currently, stress-detection studies in the literature are often limited to laboratory studies or to specific situations. However, daily stressors are ongoing, and therefore, detection of stress in everyday life (outside the laboratory environments) is important to improve the wellbeing of individuals. Computer games are entertainment media that can be found in almost every household in the modern society. Statistics show that people spend hours playing computer games daily. The amount of data that gameplay generates and interactivity they provide via various human computer interfaces have a lot of potential in identifying behavior patterns of the players that could assist in the process of stress detection. As such, this survey attempts to identify the extent to which computer games can be used as a medium for stress detection. Toward this end, this survey reviews the existing stress-detection studies, both laboratory techniques as well as the techniques that can be used in a home-based environment. Finally, it summarizes the stress-detection techniques that can be used within games in order to make it an everyday technology that can be used to detect and monitor stress. In addition, it is expected that development of such a technology will be useful in providing objective data to the healthcare professionals for intervention and management. Such a technology is even more required in the current unprecedented situation the world has faced due to the COVID-19 pandemic as it can be developed as a technology to manage mental health issues people are facing due to home isolation.