Pervasive Persuasion for Stress Self-Regulation

This article reports on coupled smartwatch and smartphone pervasive apps enabling stress self-regulation. Stress, the physiological responses of an organism to demanding conditions, can be both beneficial and harmful. Beneficial stress, or eustress, enhances physical or mental abilities. Harmful stress, or distress, can result in reduced abilities, anxiety, or depression. The potential of pervasive computing to enable stress self-regulation, that is, the ability to benefit from eustress while avoiding or limiting distress, is explored in this article. It first reports on Stila Computed Stress, a stress estimate computed after an original model from pulse rates delivered by smartwatches. This article then describes how Stila Computed Stress is combined with users' activity reports and pervasively delivered on their smartwatches and smartphones. It further reports on a real life evaluation pointing to the pervasive apps' persuasiveness, that is, the apps' capacity to increase subjective stress awareness so as to enhance stress self-regulation.