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).
Saidatul A. is with the Intelligent Signal Processing Cluster, Universiti
Malaysia Perlis, 02600, Arau, Perlis, Malaysia (e-mail: saidatul@
unimap.edu.my).
Paulraj Murugesa Pandiyan and Sazali Yaacob are with School of
Mechatronics, University Malaysia Perlis, 02600, Arau, Perlis, Malaysia
(e-mail: paul@unimap.edu.my, sazali22@yahoo.com.my).
[PDF]
Cite:Saidatul A., Paulraj Murugesa Pandiyan, and Sazali Yaacob, "The Assessment of Developed Mental Stress Elicitation Protocol Based on Heart Rate and EEG Signals," International Journal of Computer Theory and Engineering vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 207-213, 2015.