Wearable biosensor-based stress detection to understand and improve the quality of interactions between humans and construction and built environments

Ensuring human health, safety, comfort, and productivity is a key factor in the management of both construction and built environments (CBEs); human workers are the most important resource at construction sites and the operation of most built environments places the highest priority on serving people optimally. However, the "one-size-fits-all" approach, widely applied in current CBE operation practices, is not effective for ensuring quality of the human-CBE interaction because every individual has unique characteristics and thus differently interacts with CBEs even under an identical setup. Wearable biosensors have great potential to continuously and less-invasively monitor stress as the indicator of individuals' quality of experience during their daily work and lives, thereby enabling more individual response-aware CBE operations. However, still there is a lack of field-applicable means (1) to detect stress from biosignals in an artifact-robust and scalable manner; and (2) to provide information useful in understanding stress-related circumstances (e.g., stressor and impact) and further designing circumstance-specific effective interventions, despite these means' necessity in realizing the wearable biosensors' potential in CBEs. To fill these gaps, five interrelated studies were conducted (1) to denoise both stationary and non-stationary artifacts in biosignals collected during people's daily work and lives in CBEs; (2) to reliably assess generalizability of machine learning models for tasks monitoring human responses from biosignals; (3) to advance model generalizability across different subjects and contexts in detecting stress using a wearable biosensor; (4) to distinguish and locate stress responses related to environmental features; and (5) to differentiate stress types into positive (i.e., eustress) and negative types (i.e., distress). The individual response-aware CBE operations enabled by these studies can significantly contribute to improving human safety, health, and comfort in CBEs and ultimately promoting not only the performance of the construction industry, but only people's quality of life in built environments.