Mental Stress Detection and Performance Enhancement Using FNIRS and Wrist Vibrator Biofeedback

Abstract

Any person in his/her daily life activities experiences different kinds and various amounts of mental stress which has a destructive effect on their performance. Therefore, it is crucial to come up with a systematic way of stress management and performance enhancement. This paper presents a comprehensive portable and real-time biofeedback system that aims at boosting stress management and consequently performance enhancement. For this purpose, a real-time brain signal acquisition device, a wireless vibration biofeedback device, and a software-defined program for stress level classification have been developed. More importantly, the entire system has been designed to present minimum time delay by propitiously bridging all the essential parts of the system together. We have presented different signal processing and feature extraction techniques for an online stress detection application. Accordingly, by testing the stress classification section of the system, an accuracy of 83% and a recall detecting the true mental stress level of 92% was achieved. Moreover, the biofeedback system as integrity has been tested on 20 participants in the controlled experimental setup. Experiment evaluations show promising results of system performances, and the findings reveal that our system is able to help the participants reduce their stress level by 55% and increase their accuracy by 24.5%. It can be concluded from the observations that all primary premises on stress management and performance enhancement through reward learning are valid as well.