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Project

Personal Heart-Stress Monitor

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The saying, "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it" may be appropriate for stress. Many people are unaware of their stress level, and of what is good or bad for it. The issue is complicated by the fact that while too much stress is unhealthy, a certain amount of stress can be healthy as it motivates and energizes. The "right" level varies with temperment, task, and other factors, many of which are unknown. There seems to be no data analyzing how stress levels vary for the average healthy individual, over day-to-day activities. We would like to build a device that helps to gather and present data for improving an individual's understanding of both healthy and unhealthy stress in his or her life. The device itself should be comfortable and should not increase the user's stress. (It is noteworthy that stress monitoring is also important in human-computer interaction for testing new designs.) Currently, we are building a new, wireless, stress-mornitoring system by integrating Fitsense's heart-rate sensors and Motorola's iDen cell phone with our heart-rate-variability estimation algorithm.