An Affect as Interaction Approach for Stress Management Among Paramedics

Stress is a leading cause of errors and mental health issues for Emergency Medical Service providers, and most mitigation strategies have not always been successful. We describe our planned research to engage affect as interaction to design a system that promotes reflection and awareness to build resilience towards stress and negative emotions among paramedics. Also, although successfully implemented, affect as interaction has received far less attention in research. Therefore, we propose an affect as interaction mobile application that leverages the camaraderie nature of paramedics and the Alcoholic Anonymous (AA) framework to present paramedics and sponsors with paramedic's electrodermal activity data and users proffered contextual information for an individual or team review, discussion, and interpretation.