SCH: Detecting and mapping stress patterns across space and time: Multimodal modeling of individuals in real-world physical and social work environments

Stress has been identified as the health epidemic of the 21st century, and office-related work is a significant driver of stress among Americans due to long hours, rapid deadlines, heavy workload, and job insecurity. Yet, office workers are often entirely unaware of the impact of stress until they notice symptoms of declining physical or mental health or well-being, such as musculoskeletal discomfort, headaches, poor sleep, or lack of motivation.

Even more problematic, most individuals do not know how their work activities and the physical and social work environments are related to stress and other health outcomes. While stress is almost always treated as unfavorable, stress can be positive. Opportunities exist to better understand how to promote eustress that is energizing and essential for productivity, and minimize distress that leads to negative emotions, disturbed bodily states, strain, and burnout.

Thus, this project aims to generate new analytic models to uncover and map the patterns and pathways that influence work-related stress to understand the primary contributing factors to stress across space and time. The project will develop methods for integrating different types of data from the environment, the person, and other existing technologies to identify patterns that inform personalized solutions for improving self-awareness and management of work-related health and well-being.

By developing a deeper individualized understanding and detection of eustress and distress, this project will impact and advance workplace health and wellness. The project will serve as a foundation for the development of sensing systems embedded within smart workplaces to automate environmental supports or provide behavioral feedback. These impacts will not only lead to improved worker health and well-being but can support decreased worker absenteeism and improved productivity.

Thus, the project has the potential to change the way health and well-being are promoted and achieved in the office by engaging the worker in their health and wellness and ultimately reducing social and financial losses due to stress. The work will also have broader impacts regarding several criteria of NSF interest. It will promote awareness of the effects of the built, social, and work environments on health and well-being to encourage K-12 students to pursue careers in science and engineering.

It will enhance the infrastructure for research and education by incorporating findings into the curriculum across multiple disciplines and disseminating findings via publications, presentations, and other media.

The project will use a stakeholder-engaged, transactional approach to describe individualized experiences of stress and develop multimodal models using a wide range of bio-behavioral, environmental, and activity engagement sensing technologies to identify the most valuable combinations of data that inform personalized, automated, or technology-supported intervention approaches to stress management as workers engage in their daily work. To build an individually contextualized understanding of stress among office workers, machine learning methods that can operate with heterogeneous and noisy multimodal data streams at multiple temporal resolutions, including enabling unsupervised discovery of behavioral routines will be developed.

Individual interviews and ecological momentary assessment (EMA) surveys will be used to characterize each participant, their work, and how they understand the concepts of stress (i.e., distress and eustress), particularly related to their work. Mobile and wearable technologies will be evaluated to understand stress experiences as workers engage in different workspaces (e.g., home, formal, public) across time.

Sensing methods that could be embedded within the formal workspace to obtain alternative, complementary, or additional data useful in determining experiences of worker stress will be evaluated for differentiating worker distress from eustress. Specifically, the contribution of the physical environment, task engagement, posture, and worker emotive states to the understanding of stress will be examined.

Additionally, through focus groups that will elicit user insights, feedback, and preferences, the work will advance our knowledge about acceptance of technology for health in work settings, and how that interacts with stress/health self-management including privacy, trustworthiness, acceptance, preferred/appropriate methods for feedback or automation. Novel machine learning methods will be developed and employed to predict positive and negative stress from multimodal data that include reference assessments of behavioral traits and baseline states–including those related to stress, affect, and the job–that serve as constructs for modeling.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.