Momentary Stressor Logging and Reflective Visualizations: Implications for Stress Management with Wearables
Year: 2024
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Commercial wearables from Fitbit, Garmin, and Whoop have recently introduced real-time notifications based on detecting changes in physiological responses indicating potential stress. In this paper, we investigate how these new capabilities can be leveraged to improve stress management. We developed a smartwatch app, a smartphone app, and a cloud service, and conducted a 100-day field study with 122 participants who received prompts triggered by physiological responses several times a day. They were asked whether they were stressed, and if so, to log the most likely stressor. Each week, participants received new visualizations of their data to self-reflect on patterns and trends. Participants reported better awareness of their stressors, and self-initiating fourteen kinds of behavioral changes to reduce stress in their daily lives. Repeated self-reports over 14 weeks showed reductions in both stress intensity (in 26,521 momentary ratings) and stress frequency (in 1,057 weekly surveys).
Institutions: University of Memphis, Pennsylvania State University
Language: English
Subfield: Human-Computer Interaction
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
Awards: CIF21 DIBBs: EI: mProv: Provence-Based Data Analytics Cyberinfrastructure for High-frequency Mobile Sensor Data, CRI: CI-EN: Collaborative Research: mResearch: A platform for Reproducible and Extensible Mobile Sensor Big Data Research, G858728541, mHealth Center for Discovery, Optimization, and Translation of Temporally-Precise Interventions (mDOT)
OpenAlex ID: W4391377027