WatchAnxiety: A Transfer Learning Approach for State Anxiety Prediction from Smartwatch Data

Md Sabbir Ahmed; Noah French; Mark Rucker; Zhiyuan Wang; Taylor Myers-Brower; Kaitlyn Petz; Mehdi Boukhechba; Bethany A. Teachman; Laura E. Barnes

arXiv · 2509.13725

WatchAnxiety: A Transfer Learning Approach for State Anxiety Prediction from Smartwatch Data

Md Sabbir Ahmed·Noah French·Mark Rucker·Zhiyuan Wang·Taylor Myers-Brower·Kaitlyn Petz·Mehdi Boukhechba·Bethany A. Teachman·Laura E. Barnes

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Abstract

Social anxiety is a common mental health condition linked to significant challenges in academic, social, and occupational functioning. A core feature is elevated momentary (state) anxiety in social situations, yet little prior work has measured or predicted fluctuations in this anxiety throughout the day. Capturing these intra-day dynamics is critical for designing real-time, personalized interventions such as Just-In-Time Adaptive Interventions (JITAIs). To address this gap, we conducted a study with socially anxious college students (N=91; 72 after exclusions) using our custom smartwatch-based system over an average of 9.03 days (SD = 2.95). Participants received seven ecological momentary assessments (EMAs) per day to report state anxiety. We developed a base model on over 10,000 days of external heart rate data, transferred its representations to our dataset, and fine-tuned it to generate probabilistic predictions. These were combined with trait-level measures in a meta-learner. Our pipeline achieved 60.4% balanced accuracy in state anxiety detection in our dataset. To evaluate generalizability, we applied the training approach to a separate hold-out set from the TILES-18 dataset-the same dataset used for pretraining. On 10,095 once-daily EMAs, our method achieved 59.1% balanced accuracy, outperforming prior work by at least 7%.

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Md Sabbir Ahmed, Noah French, Mark Rucker, Zhiyuan Wang, Taylor Myers-Brower, Kaitlyn Petz, Mehdi Boukhechba, Bethany A. Teachman, Laura E. Barnes. 2025-09-17. WatchAnxiety: A Transfer Learning Approach for State Anxiety Prediction from Smartwatch Data. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13725

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