Smartphone application for contactless measurement of heart rate and stress in children

Children are increasingly stressed, particularly in school, which can harm their mental and physical development. Preventative efforts are limited by the challenges of current assessment methods for children: self-reports require verbal skills for accuracy; physiological measures are often invasive. This study addresses these challenges using a smartphone application with video photoplethysmography technology to measure children’s heart rate and explore a stress index. Specifically, ninety-nine children attending science summer camp had their heart rate and a heart rate variability (HRV)-based stress index measured using the smartphone application Anura. Handheld electrocardiography and stress questions were administered to compare with measures from Anura. Results showed that heart rate measures from Anura closely matched those from electrocardiography. While the stress index did not significantly correlate with self-reported stress in young children (ages 7-12), a preliminary strong relation with academic stress emerged in a very small subset of early adolescents (ages 13-15; n = 7). Due to the extremely small sample size, this finding is highly susceptible to small-sample bias and outlier influence. Ultimately, these findings support the feasibility of using Anura as a contactless tool for measuring heart rate in children. Although the stress index still requires validation through comparison of RR intervals and specific HRV measures, its preliminary correlation with self-reported academic stress highlights the application’s valuable potential as a convenient, non-invasive screening tool for monitoring educational stress in developing populations.