Stress Detection Through Eye Tracking Incorporating Custom Lasso Stress Index

Stress has become an increasingly common issue, significantly impacting individuals' health and productivity. Traditional methods for assessing stress levels often rely on physiological signals, such as heart rate and skin conductance. However, these methods can be impractical for continuous, non-invasive monitoring. To address these limitations, we propose a machine learning approach for stress assessment using eye-tracking data. We collected eye-tracking and Electrocardiogram (ECG) data under different stress conditions. From this dataset, we extracted relevant features and conducted preliminary analysis. We further proposed a novel stress index, the Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator Stress Index (Lasso Stress Index), specifically tailored for stress detection in our dataset. In previous studies, researchers commonly used predefined subjective stress index or Baevsky's Stress Index (BSI) for stress classification. We compared these methods and found that our proposed Lasso Stress Index yielded the highest accuracy, achieving up to 90.6% in stress classification.