Enhanced Informer Network for Stress Recognition and Classification via Spatial and Channel Attention Mechanisms

With the increase in work-related stress, the issue of psychological pressure in occupational environments has gained increasing attention. This paper proposes an enhanced Informer stress recognition and classification method based on deep learning, which guarantees performance by integrating tailored spatial and channel attention mechanisms (SAM/CAM) with the Informer backbone. Unlike existing attention-augmented models, the proposed SAM is designed to prioritize time-sensitive physiological signal segments, while CAM dynamically weights complementary stress-related features, enabling precise capture of subtle stress-related patterns. With this dual attention mechanism, the proposed model can capture subtle changes associated with stress states accurately. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, the experiments on one publicly available dataset were conducted. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method has outperformed existing approaches in terms of accuracy, recall, and F1-score for stress recognition. Additionally, we performed ablation studies to verify the contributions of spatial attention module and channel attention module to the proposed model. In conclusion, this study not only provides an effective technical means for the automatic detection of psychological stress, but also lays a foundation for the application of deep learning model in a broader range of health monitoring applications.