توصیه بیومتریک سیستم مدیریت استرس

The experiences of undergoing economic crises attest that the loss of employment prompts an outbreak of mental illnesses and suicides, increases the numbers of heart attacks and strokes and negatively affects other illnesses suffered by individuals under stress. Negative stress can devastate a person, cause depression, lower productivity on the job and the competitiveness of businesses and damage the quality of life. The Recommended Biometric Stress Management System, which the aforementioned authors of this article have developed, can assist in determining the level of negative stress and resolve the problem for lessening it. The system can help to manage current stressful situation and to minimise future stress by making the level of future need satisfaction more rational. In the first case, the system facilitates individuals to make a real-time assessment of their stress level and, after they fill in a stress management questionnaire, to get rational tips for the reduction of current stress based on the best global practice accumulated in the system. The multi-variant design and multiple criteria analysis methods are used for that purpose. The generation of recommendations and the selection of the most rational are based on criteria systems and on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Since this is an interdisciplinary area of research, psychologists, philosophers and experts in information management and decision-making theories and intelligent and biometric technologies participated in the development of this system. Over the course of this system’s development, the biometric technologies of information, intelligence and voice were integrated. The case study submitted in this article demonstrates this developed system.

As the tempo of contemporary life quickens along with the increasing rates of competition on the job market, uncertainty about the future and continual demands for greater competency, the risk of experiencing stress unavoidably rises. Stress is the physiological and psychological state of tension in a person caused by external and internal irritants called stressors. Stress is a natural reaction of an organism to internal as well as external, positive as well as negative stimuli. Stress frequently manifests in our lives and it stimulates action, inventiveness and creativity. However, long-lasting, uncontrolled stress exhausts the psyche and the immune system of an organism and it can cause various illnesses. Obviously stress not only hampers interactions but it also causes serious problems, particularly when common goals are being pursued. Research studies have shown that, at work, if the intensity of stressors is great, the speed of processing information decreases by as much as 30–50%. A person is unable to focus attention, makes many mistakes on the job, suffers memory lapses, frequently feels tired, speaks tersely at bubbling speed, loses satisfaction in activities and is either constantly hungry or lacks appetite. Typical illnesses caused by stress are hypertension, stomach and intestine ulcers, migraine headaches, heart (myocardial) attack and certain immuno-allergic illnesses. Research has convincingly shown that the rates of illness and death from such causes are 1.8–2.2 times higher amongst persons who have suffered long bouts of stress. Work-related stress is an especially relevant problem. Stress is the second leading cause after backaches of work-related health problems in the European Union (28% of employees). Stress is also a stressal collapse (World Health Organisation Learning Materials, 2009). Stress causes over a fourth of all work-related health disorders which result in an absence from work for two or more weeks thereby causing tremendous financial losses (Eurostat, 2001). Statistics from 1999 show that work-related stress costs the countries of the European Union 20 billion Euros annually (Third European survey on working conditions 2000, 2001). Furthermore this cost rises each year. In less than one decade (2008), the amount has already reached 80 billion Euros. Great Britain alone incurs costs of 18 billion Euros each year due to stress. Numerous studies have been conducted in the world attempting to explain what causes stress at work and how it can be identified and measured. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs theory (Maslow, 1943 and Maslow, 1954) is probably the most widely applied. Research shows that various scientists have specialised in depth the different and very important areas of speech and emotion analysis (Clavel, Vasilescu, Devillers, Richard, & Ehrette, 2008), emotion detection (Altun & Polat, 2009), emotion annotation (Callejas & López-Cózar, 2008), evaluation and the estimation of emotions in speech (Grimm, Kroschel, Mower, & Narayanan, 2007), ensemble methods for spoken emotion recognition (Morrison, Wang, & De Silva, 2007), speech and emotion (Douglas-Cowie, Cowie, & Campbell, 2003), emotional states that are expressed in speech (Cowie & Cornelius, 2003), voice quality in communicating emotion, mood and attitude (Gobl & Chasaide, 2003), emotions, speech and the ASR framework (Bosch, 2003), vocal communication of emotion (Scherer, 2003), emotional speech recognition (Ververidis & Kotropoulos, 2006), speech recognition (Avci & Akpolat, 2006), speaking improvement (Hsu, 2010), voice dialogue (Tsai, 2006), recognition of musical genres (Mostafa & Billor, 2009), command recognition (Savage-Carmona, Billinghurst, & Holden, 1998), intelligent home appliance control (Hsu, Yang, & Wu, 2010). According to Ververidis and Kotropoulos (2006) the most frequent acoustic features used for emotional speech recognition are pitch, formants, vocal tract cross-section areas, mel-frequency cepstral coefficients, Teager energy operator-based features, the intensity of speech signals, and speech rates. Ververidis and Kotropoulos (2006) reviewed appropriate techniques in order to classify speech into emotional states. Classification techniques based on hidden Markov models, Artificial Neural Networks, linear discriminate analysis, k-nearest neighbours, support vector machines were reviewed by Ververidis and Kotropoulos (2006). However, the above speech and emotion analysis systems cannot generate (perform a multi-variant design, multi-criteria analysis and selection out the best tips) different recommendations. The Recommended Biometric Stress Management System developed by this paper’s authors can perform the afore-mentioned function. The structure of this paper is as follows: Section 2, which follows this introduction, describes individual needs and negative stress in ever-changing micro- and macro-environments. Section 3 analyses the systems for the establishment, analysis and management of stress levels and Section 4—Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and Intelligent Systems. Section 5 provides a description of the Recommended Biometric Stress Management System and Section 6—a case study. Certain concluding remarks appear in Section 7.

Stress is one of the main elements in the process of human decision-making and planning. Stress is also significant in the cognitive process. Numerous studies are available globally which demonstrate the interrelations between stress, flip-side stress and cardiovascular diseases. Stress-related disorders encompass psychological disorders (depression, anxiety) and other types of stressal strain (dissatisfaction, fatigue and tension), maladaptive behaviours and cognitive impairment (concentration and memory problems). Therefore recognition, analysis and control of stress situations and flip-side stress can improve the quality of life, human relations and work efficiency. A good psychologist determines stress level of people by the way they speak. Recently intelligent systems may also perform these functions (recognition, analysis and control of stress situations and flip-side stress). To solve some of the aforementioned problems, a Recommended Biometric Stress Management (RBSM) System was developed by the authors of this paper. However, during the development and application of the RBSM System and the integration of its subsystems, certain problems appeared: the data bases are not yet fully developed, the interchange of electronic data and information amongst the subsystems of the RBSM System is not completely arranged and the intelligent decision support is insufficient. These problems will be resolved by the ongoing research. Additionally an analogical mobile telephone system is being developed concurrently.