Investigating Stress Among Police Training Cadets Using Machine Learning

As threats emerge, change, and grow, the life of a police officer continues to intensify. To help support police training curriculums and police cadets through this critical career juncture, this study proposes a state of the art approach to stress prediction and intervention through wearable devices and machine learning models. As an integral first step of a larger study, the goal of this research is to provide relevant information to machine learning models to formulate a correlation between stress and police officers’ physiological responses on and off on the job. Fitbit devices were leveraged for data collection and were complemented with a custom built Fitbit application, called StressManager, and study dashboard, termed StressWatch. This analysis uses data collected from 15 training cadets at the Phoenix Police Regional Training Academy over a 13 week span. Close collaboration with these participants was essential; the quality of data collection relied on consistent “syncing” and troubleshooting of the Fitbit devices. After the data were collected and cleaned, features related to steps, calories, movement, location, and heart rate were extracted from the Fitbit API and other supplemental resources and passed through to empirically chosen machine learning models. From the results of these models, we formulate that events of increased intensity combined with physiological spikes contribute to the overall stress perception of a police training cadet