Are you stressed? Detecting high stress from user diaries

Knowledge of the complete clinical history, lifestyle, behaviour, medication adherence data, and underlying symptoms, all affect the treatment outcomes. Collecting, analysing and using all these data, while treating a patient can often be very challenging. A doctor can spend only a limited time with a patient. This time is often not enough to learn about all the lifestyle and underlying conditions of a patient's life. Often patients are asked to maintain diaries of their daily activities. Diaries can help to improve adherence by increasing the consciousness of the patients, and can also serve as a way for the doctors to validate this adherence. However, diaries can be cumbersome to parse, and hence increase the task burden of the doctor. In this paper we demonstrate that automatic analysis of diaries can be used to predict the stress level of the diary writers with an F-measure of 0.70.