Abstract
COVID-19 posed a significant threat to the mental health of the population in general and college students in particular, severely disrupting their daily routines due to protective measures and lockdown policies. The abrupt transition from in-person to online learning further introduced uncertainty regarding academic performance. To comprehensively assess the impacts of the pandemic on college students, this study collected longitudinal data from June 2020 to June 2021, involving 184 undergraduate students at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. The dataset includes demographic and socioeconomic status information of participants, measures of mental health outcomes, online student engagement, computer and Internet performance, daily activity diary, general indoor environment satisfaction, Fitbit data, sensor measured indoor environment quality, facial expression, and GPA. To our best knowledge, this dataset is also the first dataset that covers multimodal assessment of mental health outcomes, online learning, and potential influencing variables during COVID-19. Data was gathered through online surveys, video recordings, IoT indoor environmental sensors, and Fitbit wristbands.
Data availability
All these files have been deposited in the Harvard Dataverse17 and are publicly accessible at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/SJ8ILQ.
Code availability
No custom code was developed for this dataset. The facial expression features were extracted using OpenFace, an open-source facial behavior analysis toolkit available online16.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by U.S. National Science Foundation (#2028224 and #1931077). Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this work are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. We also thank Soroush Farzin, Steven Van Dessel, and Jacob Whitehill for their excellent support in the project.
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Guo, X., Incollingo Rodriguez, A.C., Wang, C. et al. DEPRESS: Dataset on Emotions, Performance, Responses, Environment, and Satisfaction during COVID-19. Sci Data (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-06682-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-06682-w
