Stress Severity Detection in College Students Using Emotional Pulse Signals and Deep Learning

College students face increasing stress from difficulties with studies, employment, and social interactions, which, if left unaddressed, may lead to depression and physical illnesses. Currently, the detection of stress severity relies on self-assessment scales, while machine learning or deep learning-based approaches primarily focus on classification. This study proposes an approach using pulse signals containing emotional cues and deep learning to automatically detect the severity of stress in college students. First, pulse signals of 177 college students were collected using photoplethysmography (PPG) during they watched five virtual reality (VR) emotional scenes, including calm, sadness, happiness, fear, and tension. Pulse rate variability (PRV) and discrete PPG (dPPG) were extracted from these signals as input for detecting stress severity. Then, the proposed stress detection framework, 1DCNN-BiLSTM + Cross-Attention + XGBoost, was employed to detect stress severity, incorporating an emotional Cross-Attention mechanism. The impact of induced emotions on stress severity detection performance was examined. The results indicated that stress severity detection in emotional scenes outperformed in calm. Furthermore, the detection performance that integrates multiple emotions surpassed single emotions. The fusion of PRV and dPPG signals yielded the best detection performance. This study provides an end-to-end automated approach for detecting stress severity in college students.