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).
@article{arxiv.2401.16307,
title = {Momentary Stressor Logging and Reflective Visualizations: Implications for Stress Management with Wearables},
author = {Sameer Neupane and Mithun Saha and Nasir Ali and Timothy Hnat and Shahin Alan Samiei and Anandatirtha Nandugudi and David M. Almeida and Santosh Kumar},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.16307},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
In CHI '24 Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Honolulu, HI, USA