Quantification of Human Stress Using Commercially Available Single Channel EEG Headset

Abstract

A study on quantification of human stress using low beta waves of electroencephalography (EEG) is presented. For the very first time the importance of low beta waves as a feature for quantification of human stress is highlighted. In this study, there were twenty-eight participants who filled the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) questionnaire and recorded their EEG in closed eye condition by using a commercially available single channel EEG headset placed at frontal site. On the regression analysis of beta waves extracted from recorded EEG, it has been observed that low beta waves can predict PSS scores with a confidence level of 94%. Consequently, when low beta wave is used as a feature with the Naive Bayes algorithm for classification of stress level, it not only reduces the computational cost by 7 folds but also improves the accuracy to 71.4%.