[author: Kari Williamson]

Stressful times call for…well, Artificial Intelligence! Over the past few years, the market for wearable technology geared to detecting stress and monitoring our mental and emotional well-being has exploded.

The origins go back to places like the Affective Computing Research Lab at the MIT Media Lab, founded and directed by Professor Rosalind W. Picard. The lab describes its mission this way:

The Affective Computing group creates and evaluates new ways of bringing together Emotion AI and other affective technologies in order to make people's lives better.

Our primary motivations are to help people who are not flourishing or at risk of not flourishing.

The Costs of Stress

Stress takes a toll when a person faces continuous challenges without relief or relaxation. This can lead to numerous negative health implications, such as headaches, fatigue, sleeping disorders, digestive problems, high blood pressure, heart disease, aging and obesity. The longer the stress lasts, the worse it is for both the mind and body and the more difficult it is to recover.

Studies report that over two-thirds of visits to physicians are from stress-related illnesses. The Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) declared stress a hazard in the workplace. Stress costs American industry more than $300 billion annually.

Finding Help in the Lab

At the MIT lab and others like it, researchers have pioneered a growing range of AI technologies applied to human emotions. For example:

• Forecasting and preventing depression
• Helping exceptional people facing communication, motivation, and emotion regulation challenges
• Enabling robots and computers to respond intelligently to natural human emotional feedback, and
• Giving people better awareness of their own health and wellbeing…along with better control and protection over their most sensitive, private, personal data.

Demand for these technologies has grown as the allostatic load on us – the cumulative wear and tear of stressful lives – has amped up. As we better understand the effect of daily life in the age of Covid-19 and beyond, science has stepped up.

The Promise of AI and Wearable Sensors

Researchers who study ways to harness AI to predict stress and anxiety often see intersections with other neurological conditions. The wearable sensors that pick up on the physiological signals, for example, contain a medical-grade sensor and machine-learning algorithms that were designed for people with epilepsy. One device, that was the first smartwatch to be certified as a medical device by the FDA, uses the electrical activity on the skin to track the wearer’s seizures. In a clinical study, which compared the smartwatch’s effectiveness to that of three neurologists, the watch detected the seizures of 135 patients over 272 days 100% of the time.

Conclusion

The data that wearable technology provides could offer valuable information in litigation and insurance claims. While we have not seen them in our third-party casualty claims, these are still early days in the adoption of this technology. At the same time, brain injuries can result in temporary and permanent conditions. Depending on the severity of the injury and associated sequela, the devices can assist with brain wave activity monitoring for the self-management of various mental health disorders. We have seen patients with chronic pain use CBT (cognitive behavior therapy) with good results. We also may see usage in workers compensation cases, especially those injuries with associated brain injuries and chronic pain syndrome.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Kari Williamson for providing insight and expertise that greatly assisted this research.