Mental Stress Management

Dr. Hasan Al-Nashash, Dr. Fares Al-Shargie and Dr. Usman Tariq

Department of Electrical Engineering

[email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

Motivation

• Mental stress is one of the major emotional health problems in modern societies. Chronic health disorders and loss of productivity are possible negative outcomes of stress. A variety of health problems such as heart
• disease, obesity, diabetes, stroke and depression can result from long-term exposure to stress. In order to avoid stress and achieve the highest level of performance at work, it is necessary to detect stress in its early stages, i.e., when it is still limited to acute or episodic stress. Once the intensity/level of workplace stress is estimated, a potential vigilance enhancement method could be introduced as a means of stress mitigation.

Goal

• Quantify the level of mental stress using a fusion of multiple neuroimaging, machine and deep learning approaches.
• Investigate the effectiveness of using binaural auditory beat stimulations on vigilance enhancement and stress mitigation.

Methods

• Develop an experimental protocol to induce stress-related vigilance decrement in the laboratory.
• Record concurrently the relevant physiological, behavioral and subjective data during the experiment.
• Use advanced signal processing to enhance the quality of the EEG, ERP, fNIRS and GSR signals from other types of noise and interference.
• Develop a fusion scheme to discover the relationships between EEG, GSR and fNIRS modalities.
• Investigate the effectiveness of multi-sensory input on stress reduction in laboratory conditions.

Results

• The developed stress stimuli successfully induced stress levels on the participants at the workplace. Preliminary results on the multimodal fusion of EEG and fNIRS improved the classification of mental stress by +10% compared to individual EEG and fNIRS modality. In addition, we found that audio stimulation has significantly improved some cognitive abilities by at least 30%.