Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Research Protocols
Date Submitted: Oct 25, 2024
Date Accepted: Mar 26, 2025
Personalizing mHealth Interventions for Occupational Stress: Protocol of a Randomized Pilot Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Occupational stress is associated with detrimental consequences that are addressed by mobile health solutions. Previous developments of apps for occupational stress have not yet fully exploited the potential of multi-level diagnostics through the integration of wearable sensors for interventions. Personalizing m-health approaches in terms of intervention times and contents, which requires the use of artificial intelligence, is the next logical developmental step. The RELAX approach developed a corresponding prototype of an app-wearable-system, that is planned to be evaluated for effectiveness in terms of stress reduction and usability.
Objective:
The study protocol describes the evaluation study used to test the effectiveness and usability of the RELAX approach.
Methods:
The evaluation study was designed as a two-arm randomized trial with two phases, each with a 3-week intervention period. In both phases, employees were required to use the app to record daily stress and to wear a wearable sensor to measure heart rate variability. The app offered interventions based on algorithms, which altered the probability of their selection after having learned from the data and therefore personalized the user experience. In the second phase of the study, the sample was divided into two groups, varying the degree of personalization of the app. In order to analyze the effectiveness, it is planned to apply a two-factorial mixed within-between-design to compare the outcomes between both groups as well as in a pre-post comparison. In addition, exploratory analyses of the usability of the approach are planned.
Results:
The study has already been conducted and is ready for data analysis.
Conclusions:
The RELAX approach, including a number of factors related to personalization that have not yet been incorporated into m-health in current research, is unique to date. The results of the study will provide new insights into the next steps of advanced m-health solutions. Limitations of the study design, such as the lack of a control group and the sample representativity, have to be addressed. Clinical Trial: doi: 10.17605/OSF.IO/MYRD9
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.