PopTherapy: Coping with Stress through Pop-Culture

Abstract

Stress is considered to be a modern day "global epidemic"; so given the widespread nature of this problem, it would be beneficial if solutions that help people to learn how to cope better with stress were scalable beyond what individual or group therapies can provide today. Therefore, in this work, we study the potential of smart-phones as a pervasive medium to provide "crowd therapy". The work melds two novel contributions: first, a microintervention authoring process that focuses on repurposing popular web applications as stress management interventions; and second, a machine-learning based intervention recommender system that learns how to match interventions to individuals and their temporal circumstances over time. After four weeks, participants in our user study reported higher self-awareness of stress, lower depression-related symptoms and having learned new simple ways to deal with stress. Furthermore, participants receiving the machine-learning recommendations without option to select different ones showed a tendency towards using more constructive coping behaviors.

Self-tracking for Mental Wellness

“…Additionally, it is non-trivial to choose when and how to display feedback. Biofeedback displays in the form of games have been found to help reduce stress levels more quickly [10], but representations matter: displaying someone's stress data does make them more aware of their stress levels, but can also exacerbate their stress [33].…”

EnviroPulse

“…This could be integrated into existing computerized mental-health interventions developed by the HCI community [19] to help reduce chronic stress by pre-emptively directing users through psychologically positive environments.…”

“…In human-computer interaction (HCI), the importance of identifying and alleviating stress has been recognized, and various different sensing and mobile intervention technologies have been developed to combat the "stress epidemic" [19]. The field of affective computing has already demonstrated that technology can be used to detect and respond to emotional states [12].…”

Developing Skills for Social and Emotional Wellbeing

“…However, only a few of these systems explicitly discuss, or design for, the development of social and emotional skills needed for achieving emotional wellbeing (for exceptions see [7,8,9,11]). As such we believe that the potential of digital technology to directly scaffold or promote such learning is currently under-researched.…”