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Motivation

The problem of modeling, quantifying and detecting emotional stress response remains an open challenge to researchers. Many medical experts agree that stress is an important factor in disease prevention and recovery, yet no reliable method exists to monitor an individual's response to stressors from day to day. Previous work in physiological monitoring has focused on either sparse episodic diagnoses or on short term experiments in which the reported data is averaged over large populations (30-50 subjects)[Fah96]. The variations in individual reaction patterns over time have not been adequately modeled. To build statistical model's of an individual's response, a system must be developed to gather data during normal daily tasks. This research presents a system for use during the driving task. The driving task provides a real world situation in which repeated types of stressful events naturally occur and in which the driver is physically constrained from most activities that could mask the effects of emotional stress.



Jennifer Healey - fenn@media.mit.edu
1999-02-12