Gender Factor and Its Effects in Computation of Mental Stress

This paper presents variation in stress severity and its affects in human body for male and female participants. In this study, a wireless sensor platform is used to record physiological signals which are triggered by inducing stress in a controlled environment. Stressors are created in a laboratory by designing a protocol that contains a series of cognitive experiments. Deep breathing technique is used to relax the body before and after each mental activity. As there are equal numbers of male and female subjects, the size of sample that is highly stressed for a particular activity is determined. For classification, SVM is used to separate stressful activities form relax class. Experimental results demonstrate that the affect of stress is similar for both categories of the participants and accuracy metrics are also same. It supports the notion that male and female subjects react similarly under stress and in reaction, the quantity and quality of physiological signals that are produced to cope with the stress, are also similar.