Objective Prediction of Tomorrow's Affect Using Multi-Modal Physiological Data and Personal Chronicles: A Study of Monitoring College Student Well-being in 2020

Abstract: Monitoring and understanding affective states are important aspects of healthy functioning and treatment of mood-based disorders. Recent advancements of ubiquitous wearable technologies have increased the reliability of such tools in detecting and accurately estimating mental states (e.g., mood, stress, etc.), offering comprehensive and continuous monitoring of individuals over time. Previous attempts to model an individual's mental state were limited to subjective approaches or the inclusion of only a few modalities (i.e., phone, watch). Thus, the goal of our study was to investigate the capacity to more accurately predict affect through a fully automatic and objective approach using multiple commercial devices. Longitudinal physiological data and daily assessments of emotions were collected from a sample of college students using smart wearables and phones for over a year. Results showed that our model was able to predict next-day affect with accuracy comparable to state of the art methods.