Measuring acute stress response through physiological signals: towards a quantitative assessment of stress
Open accessAbstract
Social and medical problems associated with stress are increasing globally and seriously affect mental health and well-being. However, an effective stress-level monitoring method is still not available. This paper presents a quantitative method for monitoring acute stress levels in healthy young people using biomarkers from physiological signals that can be unobtrusively monitored. Two states were induced to 40 volunteers, a basal state generated with a relaxation task and an acute stress state generated by applying a standard stress test that includes five different tasks. Standard psychological questionnaires and biochemical markers were utilized as ground truth of stress levels. A multivariable approach to comprehensively measure the physiological stress response is proposed using stress biomarkers derived from skin temperature, heart rate, and pulse wave signals. Acute physiological stress levels (total-range 0-100 au) were continuously estimated every 1 min showing medians of 29.06 au in the relaxation tasks, while rising from 34.58 to 47.55 au in the stress tasks. Moreover, using the proposed method, five statistically different stress levels induced by the performed tasks were also measured. Results obtained show that, in these experimental conditions, stress can be monitored from unobtrusive biomarkers. Thus, a more general stress monitoring method could be derived based on this approach. Graphical abstract Stress measurements of different healthy young people throughout a Stress Session that includes a pre-relax stage (BL s), memory test (ST and MT), stress anticipation time (SA), video display (VD) and arithmetic task.
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The utility of other pulse wave features for assessing stress has been investigated.
“In addition, the utility of other pulse wave features has been investigated”
From Wearable Photoplethysmography for Cardiovascular Monitoring (2022) · cites this paper as [230]
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- Authors
- Arza, A., Garzón-Rey, J. M., Lázaro, J., Gil, E., Lopez-Anton, R., de la Camara, C., Laguna, P., Bailon, R., & Aguiló, J.
- Affiliations
- Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ES)
- University of Connecticut (US)
- Universidad de Zaragoza (ES)
- Corresponding author
- Arza, Adriana
- Aguiló, Jordi
- Venue
- Medical & Biological Engineering & Computing
- Published
- 2018-08-09
- Volume
- 57
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 271-287
- ISSN
- 0140-0118 (ISSN-L)
- 1741-0444
- OpenAlex
- W2886983335
- Cited by
- 148
- References
- 59
- Citations by year
- 2026: 11 · 2025: 23 · 2024: 30 · 2023: 26 · 2022: 20 · 2021: 22 · 2020: 9 · 2019: 7
- FWCI
- 12.44
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- zaguan.unizar.es
- Licence
- cc-by-nc-nd
- www.springer.com/tdm (tdm)
- Locations
- Medical & Biological Engineering & Computing (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Zaguan (University of Zaragoza Repository) (acceptedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- LA Referencia (Red Federada de Repositorios Institucionales de Publicaciones Científicas) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- Infoscience (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- Funders
- Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (FIS-PI12/00514, TIN2014-53567-R)
- Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red en Bioingeniería, Biomateriales y Nanomedicina
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Emotion and Mood Recognition
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Cardiology and Cardiovascular Medicine › Heart Rate Variability and Autonomic Control
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Biomedical Engineering › Non-Invasive Vital Sign Monitoring
- Keywords
- acute stress response, stress monitoring, physiological biomarkers, non-intrusive monitoring, skin temperature, heart rate, pulse wave, stress testing, young adults, mental health
- MeSH terms
- Electrocardiography, Humans, Monitoring, Physiologic, Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted, Stress, Psychological, Biomarkers, Photoplethysmography
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