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Stream/Area:
-
Subject:
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Paper ID:
IJSREM66366
Volume:
10 |
7 |
Jul 2026
Pages:
1-6
Publication Frequency:
Monthly (12 issues per year)
License:International Journal of Scientific Research in Engineering and Management follows the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) License, allowing free use and distribution with proper attribution.
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Government College Engineering, Karad
Department of Information Technology
Government College Engineering, Karad
Mental stress is a common health issue among the population associated with cardiovascular, neurological and emotional diseases. EEG is one of the most valuable modalities for objective stress assessment, as it directly records neural activity with high temporal resolution. This paper proposes a hybrid deep learning network, MSA-CBL (Multi-Scale Attention CNN-BiLSTM), which integrates a multi-scale convolution module, a squeeze-and-excitation (SE) channel attention module, a bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) module, and a self-attention module to analyze EEG signals for stress detection. The model enables automatic end-to-end, multi-channel EEG analysis, learning discriminative spatiotemporal representations directly from the signal without hand-crafted features. The binary (stress vs. normal) classification accuracy of MSA-CBL is 92.4% and the F1-score is 96.1% on SAM-40, outperforming all baseline methods. The individual and combined effects of multi-scale convolution, channel attention, and temporal modeling are validated through ablation experiments. Visualizations of the attention weights and spectral analyses further reveal that the model is sensitive to EEG patterns that reflect physiologically relevant brain states, including increased frontal beta activity and decreased alpha activity during stress.
KEYWORDS
The paper introduced MSA-CBL (Multi-Scale Attention CNN-BiLSTM) which is an end-to-end network for robust stress detection using EEG signals. It merges four complementary parts together into one differentiable pipeline, which are: multi-scale parallel convolution, squeeze and excite channel attention, bi-directional LSTM temporal modeling, and additive self-attention. MSA-CBL's performance is competitive with the highest state of the art method in literature and surpasses the other 9 baseline methods with accuracy of 92.4% and F1-score of 96.1% on SAM-40 dataset. In future work, multi-level stress estimation in continuous-label datasets and generalization across datasets through domain adaptation and transfer learning will receive attention. Additionally, multimodal extensions that utilize other physiological measurements, such as heart rate variability (HRV), electrodermal activity (EDA) and respiration measurements will be explored, to improve the development of a more holistic system of stress monitoring. Future research will aim at individual-level explainability using formal attribution techniques, like Integrated Gradients or SHAP; clinical validation of wearable EEG systems with dry electrodes in ambulatory environments; and strategies for personalization, reducing inter-subject variability.
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Publication Date
7/27/2026
Peer Review Type
Double-Blind Peer Review
Review Rounds: 2
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The authors declare no conflict of interest related to this research work.
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