DeepStress: Supporting Stressful Context Sensemaking in Personal Informatics Systems Using a Quasi-experimental Approach

Personal informatics (PI) systems are widely used in various domains such as mental health to provide insights from self-tracking data for behavior change. Users are highly interested in examining relationships from the self-tracking data, but identifying causality is still considered challenging. In this study, we design DeepStress, a PI system that helps users analyze contextual factors causally related to stress. DeepStress leverages a quasi-experimental approach to address potential biases related to confounding factors. To explore the user experience of DeepStress, we conducted a user study and a follow-up diary study using participants' own self-tracking data collected for 6 weeks. Our results show that DeepStress helps users consider multiple contexts when investigating causalities and use the results to manage their stress in everyday life. We discuss design implications for causality support in PI systems.

• Human-centered computing → Ubiquitous and mobile computing design and evaluation methods; User studies.