Detecting cognitive and physical stress through typing behavior

Monitoring of cognitive and physical function is central to the care of people experiencing or at risk for various health conditions, but existing solutions rely on intrusive methods that are inadequate for continuous tracking. This research explores the possibility of detecting cognitive and physical stress by monitoring keyboard interactions with the eventual goal of detecting acute or chronic changes in cognitive and physical function. Preliminary results indicate that it is possible to classify cognitive and physical stress conditions relative to non-stress conditions based on keystroke and text features with accuracy rates comparable to those currently obtained using affective computing methods. The proposed approach is attractive because it requires no additional hardware, is unobtrusive, is adaptable to each user, and is very low-cost.