Towards Using Situational Information to Detect an Individual's Perceived Stress Level
Key: NED+17-1
Author: Svenja Neitzel, Frank Englert, Rahul Dwarakanath, Katharina Schneider, Kathrin Reinke, Gisela Gerlach, Christoph Rensing, Doreen Böhnstedt, Ruth Stock-Homburg
Date: March 2017
Kind: In proceedings
Publisher: IEEE
Book title: Pervasive Computing and Communication Workshops (PerCom Workshops), 2017 IEEE International Conference on
Abstract: The advent of state-of-the-art telecommunication devices like smartphones has led to a considerable increase in the amount of electronic communication exchanged. While the improved user availability increases personal flexibility - reducing rigidity in time and place of communication - it comes at a price. The 'anytime, anyplace'-accessibility, which has become the norm in today's (working) society, can cause adverse effects to an individual’s mood and emotions, and especially raise the stress level. Consequently, in this paper, we discuss methods for measuring the stress level via mobile devices, analyzing their pros and cons. Subsequently, we analyze which situational information - comprising the prevailing context of the users and their usage of communication devices - is useful for the quantification of the psychological stress perceived by users. Based on an field study with 27 users, we observe that, while longer working hours and higher number of appointments have a positive correlation with an increased stress level, there is no one-fits-all method for stress measurement. In turn, we take the first steps towards non-intrusive methods to identify stressful situations and thus, lay the foundation for future research on user stress mitigation.
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