Having a Bad Day? Detecting the Impact of Atypical Life Events Using Wearable Sensors
This work addresses the problem of monitoring and potentially intervening in the negative psychological effects of life events for workers, though it is incremental in applying existing sensing and modeling techniques to new data.
The study tackled the problem of detecting the impact of atypical life events on psychological states using wearable sensors, showing that positive events increase positive affect and negative events increase stress and anxiety, with major negative events reducing positive affect for multiple days, and that sensors paired with embedding-based models can detect these events in hundreds of workers.
Life events can dramatically affect our psychological state and work performance. Stress, for example, has been linked to professional dissatisfaction, increased anxiety, and workplace burnout. We explore the impact of positive and negative life events on a number of psychological constructs through a multi-month longitudinal study of hospital and aerospace workers. Through causal inference, we demonstrate that positive life events increase positive affect, while negative events increase stress, anxiety and negative affect. While most events have a transient effect on psychological states, major negative events, like illness or attending a funeral, can reduce positive affect for multiple days. Next, we assess whether these events can be detected through wearable sensors, which can cheaply and unobtrusively monitor health-related factors. We show that these sensors paired with embedding-based learning models can be used ``in the wild'' to capture atypical life events in hundreds of workers across both datasets. Overall our results suggest that automated interventions based on physiological sensing may be feasible to help workers regulate the negative effects of life events.