The Digital Stress Test (DST) is a novel digital research tool that enables the standardized induction and (video-)recording of acute stress responses in outside-the-lab settings.

It is designed as an easy-to-use smartphone web application where participants can conduct stress studies without any direct communication to researchers or additional resources required (i.e. wearables or native application downloads).

Based on well-known stress induction principles of classical stress paradigms, the DST comprises a mental arithmetic task and several verbal-answering scenarios. Multiple elements of social evaluative threat and uncontrollability enhance the stress induction paradigm to elicit a robust psychosocial stress response; a control version (C-DST) without said elements is also available. At the same time it enables the collection of multimodal behavior data through the front-camera and microphones of the devices. There is also a version with no data collection available if you are looking for a way to induce social evaluative stress. As an universal research tool, it can be easily adapted to different scenarios and potentially combined with other smartphone-applicable sensoring methods.