Comparison of Subjective and Physiological Stress Levels in Home and Office Work Environments

Work stress can have serious deleterious effects for individuals and society and therefore its management is of great importance. Work environment has been demonstrated as one of the significant factors effecting work stress. Recently, COVID-19 has led to an increased frequency of individuals working in hybrid work environments mainly comprising of home and office environments. The effects these work environments have on individuals’ mental stress is important to understand for both employers and employees so they can mitigate and effectively manage the mental stress. In this paper, we present an intelligent approach to predict the stress occurrences using the physiological data acquired from individuals working in both remote and office locations. Multiple factors are collected related to physiological indicators of stress and subjective performance level. We developed a boosted tree ensemble model which produced binary stress classification accuracy of 99.9%. The statistical outcomes indicate that there is no overall correlation between mental stress and productivity, however there is some indication of mental stress being is influenced by the work environment, the time of day and the day of the week. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Roles of caregivers in physiological data collection experiments with people with dementia and mitigating the impacts of COVID-19

Timely detection of behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia is important for the prevention and reduction of distress for people with dementia and their loved ones. Wearable computingbased systems can be used to predict such difficulties in a timely manner, but a data collection experiment is needed to collect data to develop such a system. Caregivers can be vital assets in such experiments, however, often face high burden and stress due to their caring obligations. An even greater burden has been experienced by many due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, the roles that caregivers played in physiological data collections are reviewed. Three main roles were identified as being performed by caregivers in such data collection experiments: observation of difficulties;consenting for participants and themselves;device set-up and maintenance. Roles such as aiding in recruitment and providing information to participants before and during the study were also performed. Each of these roles can present their own burdens, which can be mitigated in a number of ways. Overall, it is vital that researchers consider the burden that may be placed on the caregiver who is fulfilling any of these roles in an experiment with sufficient mitigations to those burdens being implemented. Furthermore, we propose a pivot in our research towards analysing stress during the pandemic, justifying how this will help towards developing a system to detect dementia-related difficulties. © 2021 IEEE.

Review of Methods for Data Collection Experiments with People with Dementia and the Impact of COVID-19

The development of a wearable-based system for detecting difficulties in the daily lives of people with dementia would be highly useful in the day-to-day management of the disease. To develop such a system, it would be necessary to identify physiological indicators of the difficulties, which can be identified by analyzing physiological datasets from people with dementia. However, there is no such data available to researchers. As such, it is vital that data is collected and made available in future. In this paper we perform a review of past physiological data collection experiments conducted with people with dementia and evaluate the methods used at each stage of the experiment. Consideration is also given to the impacts and limitations imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns both on the people with dementia- such people being one of the most at risk and affected groups- and on the efficacy and safety of each of the methods. It is concluded that the choice of method to be utilized in future data collection experiments is heavily dependent on the type and severity of the dementia the participants are experiencing, and that the choice of remote or COVID-secure methods should be used during the COVID-19 pandemic;many of the methods reviewed could allow for the spread of the virus if utilized during a pandemic. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.