A Sensor-enabled Digital Trier Social Stress Test in an Enterprise Context.

The Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) protocol is a widely accepted method of inducing social and/or cognitive stress in participants and studying its effects. Traditionally, this protocol is administered in laboratory or university settings, which are less formal than in offices. In this paper, we report the results of the analysis of multi-modal sensor data collected from employees of an enterprise who underwent the test. We briefly discuss the adaptations that enabled administering it digitally in a semi-automatic mode with minimal researcher/test-administrator intervention. In our setup, noninvasive sensor-signals, including the Galvanic Skin Response and Photoplethysmogram, were collected during and outside the stress-inducing tasks. We analyze the data collected from twenty participants and show that the State Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) score is needed in assessing the effect of the digital version of the TSST. A support vector machine classifier yielded an F score of 0.723 with the STAI score taken as ground truth. We also introduce the idea of ground truth based on the change in the STAI scores to reduce variation due to subjective interpretation, for which an F score of 0.847 was obtained.