Automatic stress detection in car drivers based on non-invasive physiological signals using machine learning techniques

Abstract Stress is now thought to be a major cause to a wide range of human health issues. However, many people may ignore their stress feelings and disregard to take action before serious physiological and mental disorders take place. The heart rate (HR) and blood pressure (BP) are the most physiological markers used in various studies to detect mental stress for a human, and because they are captured non-invasively using wearable sensors, these markers are recommended to provide information on a person’s mental state. Most stress assessment studies have been undertaken in a laboratory-based controlled environment. This paper proposes an approach to identify the mental stress of automotive drivers based on selected biosignals, namely, ECG, EMG, GSR, and respiration rate. In this study, six different machine learning models (KNN, SVM, DT, LR, RF, and MLP) have been used to classify between the stressed and relaxation states. Such system can be integrated with a Driver Assistance System (DAS). The proposed stress detection technique (SDT) consists of three main phases: (1) Biosignal Pre-processing, in which the signal is segmented and filtered. (2) Feature Extraction, in which some discriminate features are extracted from each biosignal to describe the mental state of the driver. (3) Classification. The results show that the RF classifier outperforms other techniques with a classification accuracy of 98.2%, sensitivity 97%, and specificity 100% using the drivedb dataset.