An interpretable multimodal deep learning model for physiological stress detection

Stress is a major contributor to physical and mental health disorders, underscoring the need for reliable and interpretable detection systems. We present an interpretable multimodal deep learning framework that integrates electrocardiogram (ECG), electrodermal activity (EDA), and respiration signals using modality-specific neural architectures complemented by feature-based classical models. To ensure robustness and generalizability, the framework was evaluated under both subject-independent and subject-dependent protocols. Results show that multimodal fusion consistently outperformed single modalities, achieving 94.8% accuracy, 93.9% F1-score, and 0.97 AUC under subject-independent validation, compared with 86-91% accuracy for individual signals. In subject-dependent experiments, performance reached 97.2% accuracy and 96.8% F1-score. Comparative analysis with recent state-of-the-art methods demonstrated the competitiveness of our approach, while ablation studies confirmed the contribution of each modality and fusion strategy. Statistical significance testing with (p < 0.05) further validated the reliability of these gains. Importantly, interpretability analyses using Grad-CAM and attention visualization provided physiological insights, revealing that the model emphasizes clinically meaningful regions such as ECG R-peaks and phasic EDA fluctuations. By uniting high performance, robustness, and interpretability, this work advances stress detection research and offers a physiologically grounded framework for continuous mental health monitoring.