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Background: Mental stress and its consequent mental disorders (MDs) are significant public health issues. With the advent of machine learning (ML), there's potential to harness computational techniques for better understanding and addressing these problems. This review seeks to elucidate the current ML methodologies employed in this domain to enhance the detection, prediction, and analysis of mental stress and MDs. Objective: This review aims to investigate the scope of ML methodologies used in the detection, prediction, and analysis of mental stress and MDs. Methods: Utilizing a rigorous scoping review process with PRISMA-ScR guidelines, this investigation delves into the latest ML algorithms, preprocessing techniques, and data types used in the context of stress and stress-related MDs. Results and Discussion: A total of 98 peer-reviewed publications were examined. The findings highlight that Support Vector Machine (SVM), Neural Network (NN), and Random Forest (RF) models consistently exhibit superior accuracy and robustness among ML algorithms. Physiological parameters such as heart rate measurements and skin response are prevalently used as stress predictors due to their rich explanatory information and ease of data acquisition. Dimensionality reduction techniques, including mappings, feature selection, filtering, and noise reduction, are frequently observed as crucial steps preceding the training of ML algorithms. Conclusion: This review identifies significant research gaps and outlines future directions for the field. These include model interpretability, model personalization, the incorporation of naturalistic settings, and real-time processing capabilities for the detection and prediction of stress and stress-related MDs. Keywords: Machine Learning; Deep Learning; Data Preprocessing; Stress Detection; Stress Prediction; Stress Monitoring; Mental Disorders

Background: The human mind is multimodal. Yet most behavioral studies rely on century-old measures such as task accuracy and latency. To create a better understanding of human behavior and brain functionality, we should introduce other measures and analyze behavior from various aspects. However, it is technically complex and costly to design and implement the experiments that record multiple measures. To address this issue, a platform that allows synchronizing multiple measures from human behavior is needed. Method: This paper introduces an opensource platform named OpenSync, which can be used to synchronize multiple measures in neuroscience experiments. This platform helps to automatically integrate, synchronize and record physiological measures (e.g., electroencephalogram (EEG), galvanic skin response (GSR), eye-tracking, body motion, etc.), user input response (e.g., from mouse, keyboard, joystick, etc.), and task-related information (stimulus markers). In this paper, we explain the structure and details of OpenSync, provide two case studies in PsychoPy and Unity. Comparison with existing tools: Unlike proprietary systems (e.g., iMotions), OpenSync is free and it can be used inside any opensource experiment design software (e.g., PsychoPy, OpenSesame, Unity, etc., https://pypi.org/project/OpenSync/ and https://github.com/moeinrazavi/OpenSync_Unity). Results: Our experimental results show that the OpenSync platform is able to synchronize multiple measures with microsecond resolution., Comment: 16 pages, 5 figures, 5 tables

The COVID-19 disease spreads swiftly, and nearly three months after the first positive case was confirmed in China, Coronavirus started to spread all over the United States. Some states and counties reported high number of positive cases and deaths, while some reported lower COVID-19 related cases and mortality. In this paper, the factors that could affect the risk of COVID-19 infection and mortality were analyzed in county level. An innovative method by using K-means clustering and several classification models is utilized to determine the most critical factors. Results showed that mean temperature, percent of people below poverty, percent of adults with obesity, air pressure, population density, wind speed, longitude, and percent of uninsured people were the most significant attributes, Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, 5 tables