Your smartphone may soon be able to tell you when you are most stressed, with the help of a software that can identify stress from your voice patterns.

The app, StressSense, is first trained to recognise a person’s unstressed voice. For that, users must relax and read a three-minute passage from a book into their phones.
The system compares this recording with its pre-programmed knowledge of the physiological changes stress induces — speaking at a faster rate and a clipped frequency spectrum.
The application then takes note of any instance of stress it detects in the voice.
Noise environments
“Our stress model also adapts [itself] to different background noise environments,” Hong Lu of Intel in Santa Clara, California, who developed the system, told New Scientist.
In a series of tests, which included putting volunteers through a mock job interviews, the researchers found that their prototype’s stress-recognition accuracy was 81 per cent indoors and 76 per cent outdoors, where sound quality wasn’t as good.
The researchers plan to make the system a plug-in to an Android application called BeWell, which uses a phone’s accelerometers and Global Positioning System sensors to record users’ activity and sleep levels.
Smartphone users will be able to set StressSense to listen to their voice throughout the day or activate it when they are having a phone conversation.
The app will be presented at the Ubicomp conference, scheduled in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for next month. — PTI