GRETA: erGonomic stREss Tracking pAd

Abstract

Several studies have shown stress to be associated with increased rates of heart attack, hypertension, and other disorders. In this regard, office workers are subjected to the dullness of their daily working routine which does nothing but increase their stress exposure. On the basis of these facts, our work acts as a proposal for a novel health-care-embedded system thought to detect the time course of a few vital signs, strictly related to stress, and to be a cost-effective solution for the market. The project, named GRETA (erGonomic stREss Tracking pAd), is based on a rubber-cork working pad provided with a set of photoplethysmography sensors that allow us to collect data about the ventral-wrist heart rate time evolution of average workers in an office setting environment. To this purpose, we designed our device in order to be as comfortable and noninvasive as possible and the implementation of the software and hardware part aims at reducing any environmental noise source, i.e., thermal noise, irregular detection, and sudden movements, in order to enable a cleaner data analysis.