Wearable sensor-based evaluation of psychosocial stress in patients with metabolic syndrome

Abstract

The prevalence of metabolic disorders has increased rapidly as such they become a major health issue recently. Despite the definition of genetic associations with obesity and cardiovascular diseases, they constitute only a small part of the incidence of disease. Environmental and physiological effects such as stress, behavioral and metabolic disturbances, infections, and nutritional deficiencies have now revealed as contributing factors to develop metabolic diseases. This study presents a multivariate methodology for the modeling of stress on metabolic syndrome (MES) patients. We have developed a supporting system to cope with MES patients' anxiety and stress by means of several biosignals such as ECG, GSR, body temperature, SpO(2), glucose level, and blood pressure that are measured by a wearable device. We employed a neural network model to classify emotions with HRV analysis in the detection of stressor moments. We have accurately recognized the stressful situations using physiological responses to stimuli by utilizing our proposed affective state detection algorithm. We evaluated our system with a dataset of 312 biosignal records from 30 participants and the results showed that our proposed method achieved an average accuracy of 92% and 89% in distinguishing stress level in MES and other groups respectively. Both being the focus of an MES group and others proved to be highly arousing experiences which were significantly reflected in the physiological signal. Exposure to the stress in MES and cardiovascular heart disease patients increases the chronic symptoms. An early stage of comprehensive intervention may reduce the risk of general cardiovascular events in these particular groups. In this context, the use of e-health applications such as our proposed system facilitates these processes.