Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Research Protocols
Date Submitted: Jun 23, 2024
Date Accepted: May 28, 2025
Feasibility of digitally identifying and minimizing stressors at the Palliative care workplace by measuring stress continuously in nurses through wearable sensors (DiPa): Protocol for prospective cross-sectional study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Nursing in palliative medicine combines primary patient care with the special challenges of this medical field, e.g., handling the processes of dying, grief, and death. These cause high stress levels and burden on the nursing staff, fostering early drop-outs of working life because of physical or psychological disorders like burnout.
Objective:
DiPa is a prospective cross-sectional study which investigates the feasibility of measuring the burden and its causes in palliative care using methods of subjective and objective stress detection. Based on these results, stress-reducing interventions are to be deduced and evaluated. In this paper, we present our study protocol.
Methods:
The nursing staff of an inpatient university palliative hospital ward gathered data over 6 weeks. Each was equipped with a smart wrist band and a smartphone which continuously measured physiological and ambient parameters throughout their working days. These objective data were enriched by subjective measurements: a questionnaire at the beginning of the study, which assessed multiple potential stressful situations and constellations in the private and working environment, and ecological momentary assessments (EMA) during the workday, which were prompted by scanning near-field communication (NFC) tags placed at different locations on the ward. The ongoing data analyses will be processed by using computer algorithms partly programmed specifically for this study and partly drawn from existing libraries, such as toolboxes for neurophysiological signal processing for Python. Comparisons between subjective and objective measures and group comparisons between variables of interest will be made using inferential statistics, including regression analyses and analyses of variance. Data analysis using machine learning algorithms will be implemented once sufficient data will have been gathered.
Results:
As of April 2024, 12 of 18 nurses of the Palliative Care Unit consented to participate in our study.
Conclusions:
The DiPa study aims at testing the feasibility of measuring and merging subjective and objective stress parameters in a palliative care nurses.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.