MouStress: Detecting Stress from Mouse Motion

Stress causes and exacerbates many physiological and men-tal health problems. Routine and unobtrusive monitoring of stress would enable a variety of treatments, from break-taking to calming exercises. It may also be a valuable tool for as-sessing effects (frustration, difficulty) of using interfaces or applications. Custom sensing hardware is a poor option, be-cause of the need to buy/wear/use it continuously, even before stress-related problems are evident. Here we explore stress measurement from common computer mouse operations. We use a simple model of arm-hand dynamics that captures mus-cle stiffness during mouse movement. We show that the within-subject mouse-derived stress measure is quite strong, even compared to concurrent physiological sensor measure-ments. While our study used fixed mouse tasks, the stress sig-nal was still strong even when averaged across widely varying task geometries. We argue that mouse sensing “in the wild” may be feasible, by analyzing frequently-performed opera-tions of particular geometries