Investigating the Role of Context in Perceived Stress Detection in the Wild

The advances in mobile and wearable sensing have led to a myriad of approaches for stress detection in both laboratory and free-living settings. Most of these methods, however, rely on the usage of some combination of physiological signals measured by the sensors to detect stress. While these solutions work great in a lab or a controlled environment, the performance in free-living situations leaves much to be desired. In this work, we explore the role of context of the user in free-living conditions, and how that affects users' perceived stress levels. To this end, we conducted an 'in-the-wild' study with 23 participants, where we collected physiological data from the users, along with 'high-level' contextual labels, and perceived stress levels. Our analysis shows that context plays a significant role in the users' perceived stress levels, and when used in conjunction with physiological signals leads to much higher stress detection results, as compared to relying on just physiological data.