StressShoe: A DIY Toolkit for just-in-time Personalised Stress Interventions for Office Workers Performing Sedentary Tasks

Abstract

Self-Tracking stress at work is an important aspect of stress management and is often the first step to improving mental health and personal well-being. We introduce StressShoe, a DIY toolkit for self-tracking stress and just-in-time stress interventions for office workers performing sedentary tasks. Informed by a focus group study and a pilot study, we designed and tested a toolkit that consists of a single, off-the-shelf, shoe-mounted inertial measurement unit (IMU), a machine learning model that estimates acute stress, and a companion mobile app. The mobile app allows for user-defined just-in-time interventions on the estimated stress level. To demonstrate the benefits of our system we evaluated StressShoe with 10 users over 4 weeks. We identified several effective just-in-time personalised intervention users created and found that StressShoe is easy to use and helped them reflect on their daily stressful experiences.