Stress is an increasing challenge to the health, well-being, and productivity of the urban dwellers. World Health Organization, as well as numerous other organizations and researchers have pointed out that stress-related disorders are on the rise and will be one of the most challenging public health threats in the decades to follow. Although the awareness of stress and its negative impact on health and productivity is growing, there is a lack of cost-efficient and easily assessable tools for the public to deal with stress. Medical and psychological approaches available are costly, lack sustained effects or are hampered due to limited availability of trained professionals to deliver the stress treatments. In order to fundamentally change the way we assess and manage stress, we have launched the StressBar project. StressBar will dramatically improve the assessment of stress in people's daily life as well as offering cost-efficient and easy-to-use effective treatment. Furthermore, the StressBar project will provide stress researchers with an entire new and rapid way to study stress as well as assess the impact from various stress interventions. We believe that participatory sensing is an important method to the research. StressBar will allow us to collect information about individuals and in the future make personalized recommendations. The collective data also allow us to analyze the stress status of a region, such as Metro-Detroit. This will help the government to make more accurate decisions. For example, in more stressed areas, there should be more medical services.
Created March 22, 2016
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