Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Dec 3, 2024
Open Peer Review Period: Dec 4, 2024 - Jan 29, 2025
Date Accepted: Apr 23, 2025
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Triggered by the Heart: Effectiveness of Two Brief Just in Time Adaptive Interventions (JITAI) for Reducing Stress and Stabilizing Cardiac Autonomic Function
ABSTRACT
Background:
Transient heart rate variability decreases independent of bodily movement (additional heart rate variability reductions; AddHRVr) potentially reflect moments of psychophysiological vulnerability.
Objective:
We applied this measure by means of wearables in everyday life to trigger low-threshold 1-min interventions with the aim to stabilize autonomic function and relieve perceived stress and ruminative thoughts.
Methods:
In two pre-registered micro-randomized trials participants underwent a 1-day calibration period to derive individualized trigger settings, and then received AddHRVr-triggered and random prompts throughout the following 3 days asking for perceived stress and rumination. In Study 1, N = 60 participants underwent a slow breathing intervention (0.1 Hz resonance breathing) following each prompt and in Study 2, N = 49 participants were micro-randomized to an external attention and mindful breathing intervention, respectively.
Results:
Following interventions in both studies, perceived stress and ruminative thoughts significantly declined irrespective of the kind of prompt and intervention. AddHRVr-triggered prompts resulted in a stronger increase in HRV during the slow-paced breathing and mindful breathing interventions and elevated HRV in a time frame of 10 minutes following the interventions (in contrast to random prompts).
Conclusions:
Both studies show for the very first time that an AddHRVr algorithm can be used to trigger brief just in time interventions by wearables to stabilize autonomic function, thus potentially promoting cardiac health.
Citation
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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.