StressAwear - A multimodal wearable for shared awareness of stress in open plan offices

Open-plan offices are overstimulating and thus stressful workplaces. To overcome this, prior technological stress interventions have focused on self-awareness and management of stress. To enable more effective workplace stress management, a combination of self- and shared management is recommended. Therefore, in this paper, we design, implement, and evaluate a multimodal wearable, StressAwear, that allows for both. StressAwear notifies the wearer tangibly through a 4-step sequential sideways movement of the front part of the wearable when the wearer’s heartbeat rises. Simultaneously, StressAwear provides awareness of the wearer’s stress levels to co-workers through different coloured pulsating light frequencies on the rear of the wearable. The explorative evaluation in an open-plan office with eight participants suggests that the idea, size, and form factor of the wearable is desirable, however, the stress feedbacks were not distinguishable enough. To guide further design and research of multimodal wearables for shared stress awareness, we offer design suggestions.