With sensing technology becoming pervasive in our everyday life, the ability to monitor human psychological states has become important in human computer interaction. Amongst such states, high level mental stress or mental workload is a common problem affecting mental, physical health and life in our modern society (Nash & Thebarge, 2006; McEwen, 2007; Arnsten, 2009). Studies show that mental stress could be automatically assessed through the use of these physiological sensing technologies, in turn opening new potential ways for stress management support strategies (Healey & Picard, 2005; Hosseini & Khalilzadeh, 2010; Hernandez et al., 2011; Hong et al., 2012; Sano & Picard, 2013; Al-Shargie et al., 2016; Yu et al., 2018; Cho et al., 2017,2018,2019). However, to date, such available technologies are still relatively fragile, or restrict mobility, movement and measurement environments, limiting their use. Given this we have been focusing on building new approaches to more reliable automatic recognition of psychological states, especially, mental stress, using low-cost and mobile sensing technology, supporting unconstrained and potentially a variety of everyday situations.
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