Anxiety detection using wearable monitoring

Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) might be confused with shyness. However, experiencing anxiety can have profound short and long-term implications. During an anxiety span, the subject suffers from blushing, sweating or trembling. Social activities are harder to accomplish and the subject might tend to avoid them. Although there are tested methods to treat SAD such as Exposure Therapy (ET) and Pharmacotherapy, patients do not treat themselves or suspend treatment due economic, time or space barriers. Wearable computing technologies can be used to constantyly monitor user context offering the possibility to detect anxiety spans. In this work we used Google Glass and the Zephyr HxM Bluetooth band to monitor Spontaneous Blink Rate (SBR) and Heart Rate (HR) respectively. We conducted an experiment that involved 8 subjects in two groups: Mild SAD and No SAD. The experiment consisted on an induced anxiety situation where each participant gave a 10 minutes speech in front of 2 professors. We found higher average heart rates after induced anxiety spans on the mild SAD group. However, we found no evidence of increased SBR as an anxiety indicator. These results indicate that wearable devices can be used to detect anxiety.