Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Jan 16, 2019
Date Accepted: May 17, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
The validity of daily self-assessed perceived stress measured using smartphones in healthy individuals
ABSTRACT
Background:
Smartphones may offer a new and easy way to assess stress, but the validity has never been investigated.
Objective:
The aim was to investigate; (1) the validity of smartphone-based self-assessed stress compared with Cohen’s Perceived Stress Scale (PSS), and to investigate whether smartphone-based self-assed stress correlates with (2) neuroticism (EPQ-N), (3) psychosocial functioning (FAST), and (4) prior stressful life events (SLE), respectively.
Methods:
A cohort of 40 healthy blood donors with no history of personal or 1st generation family history of psychiatric illness and who use an Android smartphone were instructed to daily self-assess their stress level (on a scale from 0 to 2, B values reflect this scale) for 16 weeks. At baseline participants were observer-blinded assessed with FAST and filled out EPQ, PSS and SLE. The PSS assessment was repeated at follow-up
Results:
In linear mixed effect regression and linear regression models there was a statistically significant positive correlation between self-assessed stress and PSS (B = 0.0167, 95 % CI 0.0070 to 0.0026, P .001), EPQ-N (B = 0.0174, 95 % CI 0.0023 to 0.0325, P .0.02), and FAST (B = 0.0329, 95 % CI 0.0036 to 0.0622, P .03), respectively. No correlation was found between SLE and smartphone-based self-assessed stress.
Conclusions:
Smartphone-based self-assessed stress seems to be a valid measure of perceived stress and is a promising tool for measuring stress in real-time in future studies of stress and stress-related behavior.
Citation
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