ABSTRACT
An electrocardiogram (ECG) is used to monitor electrical activity of the heart. ECG data with 12 leads can help in detecting various cardiac (heart) problems. One of the significant factors that contribute to various cardiac diseases is work/personal stress. Use of various machine and deep learning approaches to analyse ECG data has yielded promising results in the field of predictive and diagnostic healthcare with less human error or bias. In our study, 10sec of 500Hz, 12-lead ECG samples were collected from the healthcare workers, who were involved directly or indirectly in taking care of COVID-19 patients. The present study was designed to determine whether Healthcare workers were stressed by using only ECG as input to a deep learning model. To the best of our knowledge, no earlier ECG based study has been carried out to identify stressed persons among the healthcare workers who are giving support to COVID-19 patients. In this study, ECG data of healthcare workers giving services to COVID-19 patients is utilized. This data was collected from four tertiary academic care centres of India. A modified version of AlexNet is utilized on this data that is able to identify a stressed healthcare worker with 99.397% accuracy and 99.411% AUC score. Successful deployment of such systems can help governments and hospital administrations make appropriate policy decisions during pandemics. © 2021 IEEE.