The Assessment of Developed Mental Stress Elicitation Protocol Based on Heart Rate and EEG Signals

Abstract

Abstract-Nowadays, stress is one of the major issues where too much stress may lead to the depression, fatigue and insomnia. Stress can be divided into two types called Eustress and Distress. However, Distress is highly focuses research field due to the harm affect to the body system. The aim of this study is to assess the developed mental stress elicitation protocol via the physiological changes in heart rate and brain activity. It is well known that mental stress may influences the heart rate and the Electroencephalography (EEG) signal. EEG signal contains information that represents the brain state and other neurological disease. A new developed mental stress elicitation experimental protocol is proposed to trigger the mental stress via Mental Arithmetic Task (MAT). Some modifications of the existing MAT have been made improve the ability of new protocol in order to ensure the targeted level of stress is properly induced. MAT which is on dynamical excitation concept and time pressure are the two combination of stressor which were introduced in this study. EEG signal processing such as preprocessing, feature extraction and classification were employed to extract and classified the mental stress features. In order to verify the ability of proposed mental stress elicitation protocol to induce properly as targeted level, three validation methods i.e statistical analysis (paired t-test), k-nearest neighbors (kNN) and Alpha Brain Asymmetry Score were adapted. Based on the results from these three validation methods, it was found that the proposed mental stress elicitation protocol is comparable to be used for further mental stress study.Index Terms-Electroencephalography (EEG), heart rate mental stress, mental arithmetic task (MAT).