Fast & Furious: Detecting Stress with a Car Steering Wheel

Stress affects the lives of millions of people every day. In-situ sensing could enable just-in-time stress management interventions. We present the first work to detect stress using the movements of a car's existing steering wheel. We extend prior work on PC peripherals and demonstrate that stress, expressed through muscle tension in the limbs, can be measured through the way we drive a car. We collected data in a driving simulator under controlled circumstances to vary the levels of induced stress, within subjects. We analyze angular displacement data to estimate coefficients related to muscle tension using an inverse filtering technique. We prove that the damped frequency of a mass spring damper model representing the arm is significantly higher during stress. Stress can be detected with only a few turns during driving. We validate these measures against a known stressor and calibrate our sensor against known stress measurements.