项目介绍

2026年10月1日

The experience of stress is an inherent part of daily life. As a PhD student in the Stress in Action project, your mission is to turn the Stress in Action toolkit from a passive measurement of the physiological stress response into a system that can act on it.

Consumer wearables such as smartwatches and rings now record heart rate and movement continuously in daily life. Using the biocue ‘additional heart rate’, which separates heart-rate increases caused by psychological stress from those caused by physical activity and posture, you will investigate, implement and test physiological triggers that send experience-sampling questions, or a brief intervention, at the moment a stress response is detected.

You will start by reviewing how physiological signals have been used to trigger experience-sampling questions and just-in-time interventions, and by contributing to the Stress in Action wearables database. You will then establish whether such triggers can run in (near) real time on the wearable and experience-sampling platforms that Stress in Action uses, and test their validity in an intensive two-week measurement study in which check-ins are triggered by participants’ own physiology. Because triggering only works if people accept and understand the cues they receive, you will also study the user experience of being cued. Using the large daily-life datasets of the Stress in Action cohort, you will compare which signals and threshold settings make the best triggers, and in the final phase you will design and pilot a first context-sensitive stress intervention delivered at detected moments of stress.

Your thesis will deliver a practical, evidence-based triggering pipeline to the Stress in Action toolkit as the foundation for its just-in-time adaptive interventions.