Modeling Gold Standard Moment-to-Moment Ratings of Perception of Stress From Audio Recordings

Enabling continuous and unobtrusive monitoring of stress is essential for delivering personalized stress interventions at opportune moments. To achieve automatic stress detection on a time-continuous basis, reliable moment-to-moment ratings of stress are required. However, the current research lacks a large-scale multimodal dataset that provides time-continuous ratings of perceived stress. Existing datasets mainly consist of single-valued self-reported ratings obtained after the stress-inducing task or rely on audio-visual recordings to capture moment-to-moment ratings from multiple annotators. The collection of time-continuous ratings of stress based solely on audio recordings has not been extensively explored. In this paper, we introduce an updated version of the publicly available VerBIO dataset that contains moment-to-moment ratings of perceived stress from multiple annotators. These annotators rated their perception of stress by listening to participants who had conducted a public speaking task. Time-continuous ratings of stress are obtained from four annotators using 22 hours of audio recordings from 339 public speaking sessions performed by 53 individuals. These time-continuous ratings of stress perception were obtained from the annotators solely based on speech, without incorporating the visual modality as an expressive marker. We examine the reliability of the annotation scheme employed in this study and investigate the factors contributing to the observed variation in perceived stress among annotators. Next, we introduce an annotation fusion technique based on expectation-maximization to obtain a reliable gold standard rating by aggregating the ratings from multiple annotators. Results indicate that the proposed annotation fusion technique yields aggregated ratings that can be estimated more reliably using acoustic features compared to the ratings yielded from conventional annotation fusion techniques. The newly generated annotations are publicly available within the proposed updated version of the existing VerBIO dataset, facilitating research in the field of continuous stress detection.