Zurich [Switzerland], April 11 : One in three workers in Switzerland experience work-related stress. When someone is impacted, it's common for them to not realise how limited their physical and mental abilities are until it's too late. This underscores the significance of recognising work-related stress as soon as it mfests itself, which is at the workplace.
A significant advance in this approach is currently being made by researchers at ETH Zurich. They have created a model that can determine our level of stress only from the way we type and use our mouse, using new data and machine learning.
And there's more: "How we type on our keyboard and move our mouse seems to be a better predictor of how stressed we feel in an office environment than our heart rate," explains study author Mara Nagelin, a mathematician who conducts research at the Chair of Technology Marketing and the Mobiliar Lab for Analytics at ETH Zurich. Applied correctly, these findings could be used in future to prevent increased stress in the workplace early on.
The ETH researchers proved in an experiment that stressed people type and move their mouse differently from relaxed people. "People who are stressed move the mouse pointer more often and less precisely and cover longer distances on the screen. Relaxed people, on the other hand, take shorter, more direct routes to reach their destination and take more time doing so," Nagelin says.
What's more, people who feel stressed in the office make more mistakes when typing. They write in fits and starts with many brief pauses. Relaxed people take fewer but longer pauses when typing on a keyboard.
The connection between stress and our typing and mouse behaviour can be explained with what is known as neuromotor noise theory: "Increased levels of stress negatively impact our brain's ability to process information. This also affects our motor skills," explains psychologist Jasmine Kerr, who researches with Nagelin and is a coauthor of the study.
To develop their stress model, the ETH researchers observed 90 study participants in the lab performing office tasks that were as close to reality as possible, such as planning appointments or recording and analysing data. They recorded the participants' mouse and keyboard behaviour as well as their heart rates. In addition, the researchers asked the participants several times during the experiment how stressed they felt.
While some participants were allowed to work undisturbed, others also had to take part in a job interview. Half of this group were also repeatedly interrupted with chat messages. In contrast to earlier studies by other scientists, where the control group often did not have to solve any tasks at all and could relax, in the ETH researchers' experiment, all participants had to perform the office tasks.
"We were surprised that typing and mouse behaviour was a better predictor of how stressed subjects felt better than heart rate," Nagelin says. She explains that this is because the heart rates of the participants in the two groups did not differ as much as in other studies. One possible reason is that the control group was also given activities to perform, which is more in line with workplace reality.
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