JoyWorkingHome: A Workshop on digital stress management solution for remote-working environments

Abstract

Occupational stress causes severe health and cost problems. Occupational stress is a key risk factor for developing mental health disorders or cardiovascular diseases1. Furthermore, mental disorders, particularly depression, and psychosocial risks, including stress and burnout, have a growing impact on workability and sick leaves2,3,4. Costs related to mental health disorders and work-related depression in Europe amount to about € 240 billion/year € 620 billion/year (EU-27).

Modern companies are starting to address this urgent topic together with their working councils, occupational physicians and psychologists, as well as ergonomic and health promoting workplace designers. However, the current pandemic has accelerated a paradigm shift in the work environment. We are seeing a drastic increase of employees working remotely. On the one hand, this brings several advantages, such as fewer commutes and thus less traffic, from an environmental perspective as well as more flexibility for workers. On the other hand, this change is also accompanied by challenges for daily life and mental health (e.g., excessive demands and stress due to a lack of temporal/spatial separation of private life and work, parallel childcare or a lack of social interaction) but also in physical areas (e.g., tension and back problems due to less movement or ergonomically less than ideal working conditions).

The points mentioned above emphasize the need for holistic solutions, which especially consider these new working styles and working environments. More precisely, there is a need for solutions that support employees not only in singular tasks and challenges but rather on an individual and stepwise guided level.

This workshop invites contributions, which are related to following topics:

• Enhancement of current approaches and digital stress management solutions towards personal abilities and goals.
• Individual remote-working environments, including individual psychological models and/or sensing devices, which can non-invasively collect biosignals indicating stress and monitor activity and behavioral patterns.

Goals

This workshop aims to attract an interdisciplinary group of researchers who are involved in research related to stress detection, assessment, monitoring, and treatment from the technological, ergological, psychological, sociological, and architectural (e.g., working environment design) perspective. The researchers will present their work and receive feedback from their peers. As part of the larger theme of the PETRA conference, the participants will also have the opportunity to interact with top scientists working with pervasive assistive technologies to exchange valuable ideas that could advance the state-of-the-art in the field.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to

• Non-invasive sensing devices for biosignal data acquisition
• Advances in behavior change evidence and theory in remote working context
• Application of behavioral change theories to develop and evaluate online or offline interventions in the field of remote working environments
• Implementation of individual and multilevel interventions that address remote working environments
• Development of mobile device app with focus on the inclusion of behavioral change techniques
• Methods for evaluating processes, user experience, and outcomes
• Translation of basic behavioral research into novel intervention technologies and strategies e.g. wearables, sensors, just in time methods.
• Machine learning and data mining tools for work stress related decision making

Workshop Organizers