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Being able to detect stress as it occurs can greatly contribute to dealing with its negative health and economic consequences. However, detecting stress in real life with an unobtrusive wrist device is a challenging task. The objective of this study is to develop a method for stress detection that can accurately, continuously and unobtrusively monitor psychological stress in real life. First, we explore the problem of stress detection using machine learning and signal processing techniques in laboratory conditions, and then we apply the extracted laboratory knowledge to real-life data. We propose a novel context-based stress-detection method. The method consists of three machine-learning components: a laboratory stress detector that is trained on laboratory data and detects short-term stress every 2min; an activity recognizer that continuously recognizes the user's activity and thus provides context information; and a context-based stress detector that uses the outputs of the laboratory stress detector, activity recognizer and other contexts, in order to provide the final decision on 20-min intervals. Experiments on 55days of real-life data showed that the method detects (recalls) 70% of the stress events with a precision of 95%., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)