SP College students develop device which can measure stress levels in five minutes

Two students from SP College Srinagar have developed an emotion-detection system that can calculate stress levels of human beings in digital format within five minutes.
The device works through Electrodermal activity (EDA; also known as Galvanic Skin Response, or GSR) mechanism.
Prof. Zafar Majeed Rather from the Department of Information Technology at SP College Srinagar told the Rising Kashmir said, “our two students, who are pursuing an integrated degree course in the information technology (IT) department have developed a device through which stress level of a human being can be calculated within a few minutes.
“As part of the degree in the sixth semester, the students have to work on projects. Two students from our department have developed a device that can calculate a human being’s stress level,” he said.
Prof. Rather explained that this is a hardware and software-based programme that calculates the stress level in graph format and converts this graph data to digital format.
“Both the students, Tabish Nabi and Muhammad Nadeem Rather, have developed this device under the departmental supervision. Expenses of the project have been borne by the two students.
“An expert committee from the college has also approved this project, on which the students have worked on,” he added.
Tabish Nabi, one of the students who have developed the stress detection device, said “we designed a fully working device that helps us detect the emotional intensity of the human subject. We crafted the device in such a way that it can be easily used to test the emotional intensity of the subject.”
“After we completed the hardware design of the device, we moved towards programming the device and developed a programme to make the device functional and accurate. We used the native language of Arduino, which is a C-like language. The code can be written in the Arduino IDE, which is specially designed to programme Arduino. We managed to get data from the sensors using loops, comparing the values with some conditional statements, and displaying the results on the screen. We also managed to run the visual and audible indicators with our software,” he said.
He said they developed a GSR-based method to detect emotions in college students. Data was gathered from 100 students enrolled at S.P. College, Srinagar. For data collection, students were randomly selected. The dataset includes 59 males and 41 girls.
A few questions were given to determine their emotional level, and the results revealed that when asked about financial issues, participants showed an upward tendency. It was also discovered in the investigation that when people listened to religious hymns, their emotions decreased.
“In the near future, the device may be used to detect the stress levels in animals. This may be possible by making some changes to the device,” he added.
Muhammad Nadeem Rather, another student, said that this device will help psychologists, psychiatrists, and doctors to know the stress level of an individual within a few minutes.
“We also presented our project presentation at the international conference on electronic and computational multidisciplinary advances, which was held at SP College on the 9th and 10th of November this month. Experts from various institutions have also praised us,” he added.