StayActive

Stress and burn-out prevention through a smartphone

Description

Prevention in the working environment should seek to avoid giving situations that may cause stress. The idea of StayActive is to provide older adults with a personalized, adaptable tool which can monitor biological signals and recommend and present various relaxation activities "just-in-time" in order to allow them to carry out and solve everyday tasks and problems at work.

Proposed techniques allow monitoring the body's response under real conditions, even in the workplace, without interfering with the normal activity of the people. In this way negative or adverse psychosocial environment can be identified, as well as protective factors, buffers that protect people against potentially harmful influences. Specific exercises and techniques will teach to control the physiological effects of stress and to reduce the symptoms perceived as unpleasant or negative that consequently creates anxiety. The best known and practiced today are those: Relaxation techniques, respiration techniques and meditation and mental relaxation. These are the kind of techniques that StayActive system will propose. It is important to note that although these techniques do not prevent or reverse the problem, they teach how to control the physiological effects of stress.

The target group of StayActive are older adults (+55) that perform various working activities in an office or in a factory. For the pilot StayActive system, extensive lab and field trials will be conducted in Romania and Switzerland. These trials are scheduled to last 5 months and will involve at least 30 participants per trail.

TaM is responsible for the stress detection on the smartphone as well as running the trials in Switzerland.