Human Heterogeneity Invariant Stress Sensing

Stress affects physical and mental health, and wearable devices have been widely used to detect daily stress through physiological signals. However, these signals vary due to factors such as individual differences and health conditions, making generalizing machine learning models difficult. To address these challenges, we present Human Heterogeneity Invariant Stress Sensing (HHISS), a domain generalization approach designed to find consistent patterns in stress signals by removing person-specific differences. This helps the model perform more accurately across new people, environments, and stress types not seen during training. Its novelty lies in proposing a novel technique called person-wise sub-network pruning intersection to focus on shared features across individuals, alongside preventing overfitting by leveraging continuous labels while training. The present study focuses on people with opioid use disorder (OUD)---a group where stress responses can change dramatically depending on the presents of opioids in their system, including daily timed medication for OUD (MOUD). Since stress often triggers cravings, a model that can adapt well to these changes could support better OUD rehabilitation and recovery. We tested HHISS on seven different stress datasets---four which we collected ourselves and three public datasets. Four are from lab setups, one from a controlled real-world driving setting, and two are from real-world in-the-wild field datasets with no constraints. The present study is the first known to evaluate how well a stress detection model works across such a wide range of data. Results show HHISS consistently outperformed state-of-the-art baseline methods, proving both effective and practical for real-world use. Ablation studies, empirical justifications, and runtime evaluations confirm HHISS's feasibility and scalability for mobile stress sensing in sensitive real-world applications.