Identification and Classification of Driving-Related Stress Using Electrocardiogram and Skin Conductance Signals

The development of on-board car electronics for automatic stress level detection is becoming an area of great interest. The literature showed that biomedical signal acquisition could provide significant information. Skin conductance (SC) and electrocardiogram (ECG) have demonstrated to provide the most significant stress-related features. Thus, the aim of this study is the classification of three-level and binary stress, using a minimal combination of SC and ECG features. The “Stress Recognition in Automobile Drivers” database was used to test a procedure based on linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA). The database protocol includes three driving periods, corresponding to different levels of stress (low-medium-high). After data preprocessing, LDA and QDA three-level classifications were applied on all the extracted SC and ECG features to determine the best classification approach. Boruta algorithm allowed to select the most significant features for the classification. Then, the best classification approach was applied on this restricted set of features, performing both three-level (low vs medium vs high) and binary (high+medium vs low) stress classification. QDA was the most accurate classification method (accuracy: 96.0% for QDA vs 85.3% for LDA, considering all the features). QDA accuracy, considering only the selected features, was 86.7% for the three-level classification and 94.7% for the binary classification. This result represents an acceptable trade-off between classification accuracy and computational cost, associated to the number of considered features. In conclusion, ECG together with SC are suitable for the objective and automatic identification and classification of driving-related stress with a good accuracy.