Identifying Periods of Cyclical Stress in University Students Using Wearables In-the-Wild
<|reference_start|>Identifying Periods of Cyclical Stress in University Students Using Wearables In-the-Wild: University students encounter various forms of stress during their academic journey, including cyclical stress associated with final exams. Supporting their well-being means helping them manage their stress levels. In this study, we used a wearable health-tracking ring on a cohort of 103 Japanese university students for up to 28 months in the wild. The study aimed to investigate whether group-wide biomarkers of stress can be identified in a sample having similar daily schedules and whether these occurrences can be pinpointed to specific periods of the academic year. We found population-wide increased stress markers during exams, New Year's, and job hunting season, a Japanese job market peculiarity. Our results highlight the available potential of unobtrusive, in-situ detection of the current mental state of university student populations using off-the-shelf wearables from noisy data, with significant implications for the well-being of the users. Our approach and method of analysis allows for monitoring the student body's stress level without singling out individuals and therefore represents a privacy-preserving method. This way, new and sudden stress increases can be recognized, which can help identify the stressor and inform the design and introduction of counter measures.<|reference_end|>
@article{neigel2024identifying,
    title={Identifying Periods of Cyclical Stress in University Students Using
  Wearables In-the-Wild},
    author={Peter Neigel, Andrew Vargo, Benjamin Tag and Koichi Kise},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.11823},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2402.11823},
    primaryClass={cs.CY}
}