A Novel Mobile Platform for Stress Prediction

Public health surveillance is typically done through self-report surveys. Personal smart devices that collect near real-time and zero-effort health data can support traditional surveillance efforts by providing novel and diverse data, which can be used to predict the prevalence of conditions in a population using advanced analytics. Apple Health is one of the most popular sources of personal health data, supporting a variety of devices that collect a wide range of information from heart rate to blood pressure and sleep. This paper introduces a mobile health platform that extracts Apple Health data to support public health monitoring based on personal devices, as well as a protocol for a study that utilizes this platform to predict stress in a population. Preliminary results are also presented: Random Forests and Support Vector Machines are used to predict the participant's stress levels and achieved an accuracy of 85% and 70%, respectively. Implications for public health, challenges, limitations, and future work are also discussed. The system described in this paper is one of the first works to leverage health data from consumer-level personal devices for public health.