Can the Way You Type Show How Stressed You are at Work?

Source: Medindia

Have you ever felt like work stresses you out too much but you just can't show it? It turns out, the way you type and click on your computer might be a dead giveaway.

Millions of employees all over the world suffer from workplace stress. Most of them don't even realize that their physical and mental health is hanging on by a thread until it's too late. This makes it all the more important to identify work-related stress as early as possible where it arises: in the workplace.

The Way you Type Could Tell How Stressed you Are

Scientists at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) or Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich are now taking an important step in this direction. They created a model that can identify how stressed we are simply by the way we type and operate our mouse, using new data and machine learning.

"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 Nägelin, 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.

Typing: Stressed vs Relaxed People

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 spend more time doing so," Nägelin says.

Additionally, people who feel stressed at work make more errors when typing. They write in fits and starts with many brief pauses. Relaxed people tend to take fewer but longer pauses when typing on a keyboard.

What's the Link Between Stress and Typing?

The relationship between stress and our typing and mouse behavior can be described by the 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 Nägelin and is the co-author of the study.

To develop their stress model, the 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 analyzing data. They recorded the participants' mouse and keyboard behavior 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 was 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.

Is Typing Behaviour an Even Better Indicator of Stress than Heart Rate?

"We were surprised that typing and mouse behavior was a better predictor of how stressed subjects felt better than heart rate," Nägelin 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.

The researchers are currently testing their model with data from Swiss employees who have agreed to have their mouse and keyboard behavior as well as their heart data recorded directly at their workplace using an app. The same app also regularly asks the employees about their subjective stress levels. Results should be available by the end of the year.

Why Data Protection is Important

However, workplace stress detection also raises some dicey issues: "The only way people will accept and use our technology is if we can guarantee that we will anonymize and protect their data. We want to help workers identify stress early, not create a monitoring tool for companies," Kerr says.

In another study involving employees and ethicists, the researchers are investigating which features an app needs to have to meet these requirements and ensure responsible handling of sensitive the data.