A Survey of Affective Computing for Stress Detection: Evaluating technologies in stress detection for better health

As we become more aware of the connection between emotional states and physical health, affective computing continues to rise as a field of interest. Affective computing uses both hardware and software technology to detect the affective state of a person. It is an active research area that has seen much growth in technology geared toward affective state analysis. Its origin is credited to Dr. Rosalind Picard of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) when she published her 1995 article on affective computing 1. It has since become a modern branch of computer science for human-computer interfaces 2, 3. This stem of computer science has two main veins: 1) detection and recognition of emotional information and 2) simulation of emotion in computational devices. The focus of the current survey is the detection and recognition of emotions as affective states.