Towards Combining Automatic Measurements with Self-Assessments for Personal Stress Management

Abstract

With the ongoing acceleration of everyday life, there is an increasing risk of long-term stress together with a lack of opportunities for recovery. While the organism activates resources through stress and thus, allows for handling demanding situations, it is important to recover in order to regain balance. Therefore, permanent stress can harm performance and is often accompanied by health problems like back pain, depression, or burnout. As smart devices like smartphones are widely used and have numerous sensors integrated, they enable IT-support for personal stress management in everyday life. We propose a framework demonstrating dimensions relevant to an IT-support based on the basic pillars of stress emergence together with measures for coping. By proposing to use a combination of automatic measurements with answers from psychology questionnaires, we intend to strengthen early stress prevention as well as tailored recommendations for stress management with a higher chance of being adopted. We complement the framework with results from an online survey. The results suggest that self-assessments on stress-relevant topics would be quite accepted. In contrast, the participants seemed skeptical about receiving recommendations for stress management.