How Laboratory Experiments Can Be Exploited for Monitoring Stress in the Wild: A Bridge Between Laboratory and Daily Life Chronic stress leads to poor wellbeing, and it has effects on life quality and health. Society may have significant benefits from an automatic daily life stress detection system using unobtrusive wearable devices using physiological signals. However, the performance of these systems is not sufficiently accurate when they are used in unrestricted daily life compared to the systems tested in controlled reallife and laboratory conditions. To test our stress level detection system that preprocesses noisy physiological signals, extracts features, and applies machine learning classification techniques, we used a laboratory experiment and ecological momentary assessment based data collection with smartwatches in daily life. We investigated the effect of different labeling techniques and different training and test environments. In the laboratory environments, we had more controlled situations, and we could validate the perceived stress from selfreports. When machine learning models were trained in the laboratory instead of training them with the data coming from daily life, the accuracy of the system when tested in daily life improved significantly. The subjectivity effect coming from the selfreports in daily life could be eliminated. Our system obtained higher stress level detection accuracy results compared to most of the previous daily life studies.

Stress Recognition with State Classification Considering Temporal Variation of Stress Responses To avoid and manage stressrelated problems, several works have investigated how to recognize stress states of people by exploiting the machine learning. Most of works utilize the supervised learning which requires labels for data to be trained and tested. Thus, labels which represent stress state of each data such as stressed or not become definitely important. Conventional stress state classification methods assign labels to unit data per a certain experimental period by applying stressor appearances or selfevaluation scores. However, those methods ignore temporal variations in stress responses which are involuntarily triggered inside the body within a shorter period of time than an experimental period. Therefore, we propose a stress state classification method by considering not only useru0027s subjective evaluations but also temporal changes of stress responses in short periods. For the demonstration, we label our experimental data of 40 subjects by using our proposed classification method and conventional ones, respectively. Then, we train and test stress recognition models with 6 machine learning algorithms and our implemented neural network ones based on the labeled data. Finally, binary stress recognition with our proposed classification method improves the recognition accuracy by up to 31.6% as compared to those with conventional techniques.