Digital technologies for non-invasive stress detection, monitoring, and mitigation in children and adolescents: a scoping review.

BACKGROUND

Stress in childhood and adolescence can disrupt emotional, cognitive, and physiological development and contribute to long-term health consequences. Conventional assessments, such as cortisol sampling and retrospective questionnaires, are often invasive, burdensome, and poorly suited for repeated pediatric use. Advances in mobile health, wearable devices, and other non-invasive sensing approaches offer new opportunities for real-time stress detection, monitoring, and mitigation in children and adolescents.

OBJECTIVE

This scoping review synthesizes evidence on non-invasive technologies for pediatric stress detection, monitoring, and mitigation, with attention to mobile, wearable, and ubiquitous health applications. It maps reported technologies, protocols, study contexts, and intervention approaches, and identifies gaps for future research and practice.

METHODS

Following PRISMA-ScR guidelines, four bibliographic databases-PubMed, Scopus, IEEE Xplore, and ACM Digital Library-were searched, with Google Scholar screened as a supplementary source. Searches covered peer-reviewed studies published from January 2013 to April 2026. Eligible studies involved participants aged 0-18 years, evaluated non-invasive technological methods for stress detection, monitoring, or mitigation, and reported empirical outcomes. Data were charted across technology type, stress induction and validation, study context, age group, evaluation method, datasets, and intervention strategies.

RESULTS

Thirty-four studies were included. Wearable and mobile sensing approaches dominated the literature, while fewer studies examined non-contact, ambient, or hybrid systems. Stress induction and assessment methods were heterogeneous, often relying on task-based, situational, or context-specific stressors rather than standardized pediatric protocols. Studies were conducted in school, laboratory, home, therapy, and emerging clinical contexts, although longitudinal real-world deployments remained limited. Children under 13 years were more frequently represented than adolescents, while younger children and developmentally diverse populations remained unevenly studied. A smaller subset examined mitigation strategies, including biofeedback, serious games, smart objects, and caregiver- or parent-mediated interventions. Ethical, privacy, and implementation issues were acknowledged but not systematically addressed.

CONCLUSIONS

Non-invasive technologies show strong potential for pediatric stress detection, monitoring, and mitigation, particularly through wearable, mobile, and interactive systems. However, the field remains methodologically fragmented. Future work should develop age-appropriate stress protocols, improve dataset diversity and transparency, conduct ecologically valid longitudinal evaluations, and strengthen ethical, privacy, and equity considerations for translation into schools, homes, telehealth, and clinical care.