Variational Instance-Adaptive Personalized Stress Recognition Based on Wearable Sensor Signals

Objective Stress has emerged as a major adverse factor affecting both physical and mental health. Timely recognition of stress is essential for effective stress management. However, substantial inter-individual variability in stress responses often leads to distribution shifts, thereby making conventional generic stress recognition models ineffective in adapting to such changes.Methods To address distribution shifts caused by inter-individual variability, this paper proposes the Variational Instance-Adaptive Stress recognition (VIAStress), a Domain Generalization (DG)-based framework that consists of two main components: Variational Instance Adaptation (VIA) and Multimodal Domain Generalization (MMDG). The VIA leverages the distribution-fitting capability of variational inference to model classifier parameters as instance-conditioned distributions, dynamically adjusting decision boundaries for personalized stress recognition. In addition, the model's feature extractor integrates the MMDG strategy to facilitate information interaction between PPG and EDA, thereby enhancing the generalization of multimodal feature representations.Results VIAStress is evaluated on four public datasets, WESAD, UBFC-Phys, VerBIO, and CAN-STRESS. Under both within-dataset and cross-dataset subject-independent settings, the proposed method achieves superior generalization performance on unseen subjects in most tasks, outperforming competitive approaches.Conclusion and significance This study introduces VIAStress, a personalized stress recognition model designed to address the practical challenges of inter-individual variability. The results show that VIAStress exhibits strong adaptability and robustness to user differences, supporting the development of more effective and personalized stress management solutions.