Although workplace stress management interventions have been shown to be effective, they are limited by how and when they deliver, contextualize, and reinforce content. In the current article, we evaluate whether a wearable-based stress management intervention can improve mental health outcomes. Employees (N = 169) drawn from a large technology corporation were randomly assigned to either a wearable-based treatment or waitlist control. The treatment consisted of a very brief mindfulness-based training accompanied by a physiological monitoring device capable of sensing respiratory patterns and a smartphone application that allowed participants to visualize respiratory changes over time, observe real-time biofeedback, and receive real-time notifications of physiological stress. After the 4-week intervention period, the treatment group reported experiencing 15.8% fewer negative instances of stress, 13.0% fewer distressing symptoms, and 28.2% fewer days feeling anxious or stressed compared with a control group. We also find marginal evidence that the treatment group reported fewer negative emotions, but do not find robust evidence that the intervention increased broad measures of well-being. The results suggest the use of wearables as a scalable means of complementing existing workplace stress management interventions and policies. Further research is needed to distinguish how interventions incorporating wearable-based components may impact mental health beyond stand-alone mindfulness trainings.
Aural and visual cues can be automatically extracted from video and used to index its contents. This paper explores the relative merits of the cues extracted from the different modalities for locating relevant shots in video, specifically reporting on the indexing and interface strategies used to retrieve information from the Video TREC 2002 and 2003 data sets, and the evaluation of the interactive search runs. For the documentary and news material in these sets, automated speech recognition produces rich textual descriptions derived from the narrative, with visual descriptions and depictions offering additional browsing functionality. Through speech and visual processing, storyboard interfaces with query-based filtering provide an effective interactive retrieval interface. Examples drawn from the Video TREC 2002 and 2003 search topics and results using these topics illustrate the utility of multiple-document storyboards and other interfaces incorporating the results of multimodal processing.
PURPOSE Approximately 40% of childhood cancer survivors experience chronic pain, with many also reporting pain-related disability. Given associations established in the general population among respiration, anxiety, and pain, continuous tracking and feedback of respiration may help survivors manage pain. METHODS A feasibility, nonblinded, randomized controlled trial (RCT) comparing wearable respiratory monitoring with a control group examined feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary efficacy among survivors of childhood cancer with chronic pain who were ≥ 18 years of age, able to speak and read English, lived in the United States, and had access to a smartphone and the Internet. The primary outcomes were pain interference, pain severity, anxiety, negative affect, and perceived stress. The intervention group (n = 32) received a wearable respiratory monitor, used the device, and completed an in-application breathing exercise daily for 30 days. The control group (n = 33) received psychoeducation after completion of the study. RESULTS Almost all participants in the intervention group (n = 31 of 32) and control group (n = 32 of 33) completed the study. Of those who completed the intervention, 90.3% wore the device for ≥ 50% of the trial. Posttreatment improvement for negative affect (Cohen d = 0.59; 95% CI, 0.09 to 1.10) was significantly greater in the intervention group compared with the control group. A follow-up study (n = 24) examined acceptability and feasibility of a second-generation device among those who completed the RCT. Most survivors (81.0%) wore the device daily during the trial and 85.7% reported satisfaction with the device and the application. CONCLUSION The results of this pilot study support the acceptability and feasibility of wearable respiratory monitoring among survivors of childhood cancer. Larger randomized trials are needed to assess efficacy and maintenance of this intervention for chronic pain.
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