A GW4 researcher has received funding from the Google Research Scholar Program to develop a novel wearable system to monitor human stress levels.
The project, which formed during GW4’s Crucible programme, will investigate and develop a wearable system that can continuously monitor human stress levels and provide non-invasive, personalised feedback to help manage stress. The system aims to be unobtrusive and able to invisibly weave into the user’s daily activities. This functionality could benefit those working in high-stress environments, such as paramedics and firefighters. It could also help people with mental health conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder and depression in managing their stress levels.
The idea was originally developed during GW4’s 2024 Crucible programme which focused on the theme: ‘Tackling health inequalities and driving social justice through radical interdisciplinarity’.
Dr. Nhat (Nick) Pham, lead on this project and lecturer at Cardiff University, attended GW4 Crucible last year and said: “The GW4 Crucible programme played an important role in the development of this project. The idea was sparked during the residential workshops, through discussions with excellent and passionate experts in neuroscience, medicine, and material science. The follow-on GW4-funded pilot project was also essential for us to carry on our research collaboration and conduct a preliminary study, which served as a solid foundation for this funding proposal.”
The project will focus on three main research questions:
- How to develop a multimodal biosensing wearable platform to capture stress-related biomarkers (characteristics of the body that can be measured) to achieve high-fidelity biosignals (high-quality reproduction of electrical signals acquired from the human body that can be continually measured and monitored) while being unobtrusive to the users.
- How to devise techniques to address the noise and artefacts from our daily activities, which is a long-standing issue, preventing the practical use of biosensing wearables.
- How to implement an intelligent algorithm to quantify and monitor long-term stress development based on the captured biosignals to provide users with a comprehensive overview of their physiological states.
The project, entitled SERENITY - Enabling continuous and personalised stress monitoring with multimodal biosensing ear-worn wearable system, will be partially funded by an unrestricted gift from Google (award of 60000 USD from the Google Research Scholar Program). The Research Scholar Program provides unrestricted gifts to support research at institutions around the world and is focused on funding world-class research conducted by early-career professors, who are pursuing research in fields relevant to Google.
The project team plan to release all the artefacts (hardware, software, and the collected dataset) available as an open-source project for future research.
