AffectiveWall: Designing Collective Stress-Related Physiological Data Visualization for Reflection

Abstract

Excessive workplace stress affects the individual's health as well as social collaborations, so the management of stressors is essential. However, an individual worker who only subjectively reflects on his or her individual and social stressors may misinterpret them, and thus not be able to manage them. This paper aims at engaging workplace stress reflection on objective stress-related physiological data using a shared display, which provides an anonymous view of the individual stress-related physiological signals (i.e., heart-rate variability) through a collective visualization. A minimalist proof-of-concept system is implemented for investigating the design space and deployed during group collaboration. The user study results show that the visualization successfully drew the participants' awareness and increased their understanding of self and organizational stress. This work highlights the importance of objective physiological data in the reflection process of organizational stress management.

Shared User Interfaces of Physiological Data: Systematic Review of Social Biofeedback Systems and Contexts in HCI

“…[77], [89], [90], [91], [118], [133], [136] Co-located [2,63,93] , [17], [32], [40], [46], [54], [87], [88], [100], [110], [116], [121], [122], [123], [142] [37], [55], [98], [112], [119], [120], [83], [130] Synchronous Asynchronous…”

“…In symmetrical systems, it was most common for users to receive biofeedback about their own physiological state together with that of other users' (n=14; [2,52,54,67,70,72,73,75,77,85,95,116,119,121]). In 12 studies, users only received feedback about states of co-users and not their own [3,29,30,45,55,65,87,91,94,110,125,133], while in four studies only aggregated measures of physiology were shown to both players [83,100,107,142]. Six studies combined the sharing physiology of all users with additional aggregated measures like average metrics [17] and synchrony level between users [46,60,61,82,113].…”

“…Studies found that engaging with social biofeedback systems encouraged individual users to reflect on the specific causes of their emotions [37,52,54,83,98,120], judge others' emotions [89,90,110] and identify triggers for negative states in particular [52,112]. Shared physiological data displays also stimulated comparative judgments and reflected on one's own states relative to another user's [27,120,121].…”

“…In some cases, users went further by actually asking probing questions about the biofeedback to fully understand the context of their co-user [52,75,110,120]. Finally, many studies also found users made guesses and explicit inferences about others' states, another sub-construct of empathy called mentalizing [40,52,54,65,75,83,89,90,110,116,119,120]. Some mixed-methods studies also measured empathy or its sub-constructs using quantitative measures.…”

“…The most explicit examples of compassion were found in behavioral manifestations of helping behavior after seeing the physiological response of another user. Several studies found that users actively tried to soothe or calm down others [52,65,83,110,130] and sometimes censored their conversations in accordance with another person's physiological display [37,110,112]. In some studies, users reported consistently checking up on another's physiological display [52,75,109] and directly helping their co-user improve their performance on a task [46,65,130].…”