Analysis of Clothing Features Improving Self-Esteem through Measuring
Stress According to Activity Contexts
Authors: Kirii Yumi , Harada Humiko , Shimakawa Hiromitsu 
Published: July 2023

In general, it is known that people's mental moods can be affected by
changing their clothes.Though low self-esteem and mental disorders related
to it have become a social problem in recent years, a simple way to change
clothes may contribute to improving depressive symptoms. This study targets
to improve self-esteem by changing clothing.There have already been a lot of
studies to improve self-esteem. They include the use of social networking
sites focusing on praise and the development of interactive technologies to
improve young people's self-esteem. However, no method has been proposed to
objectively judge whether people spend a daily life with themselves
satisfied.Stress values are constantly changing. Their means and variances
vary with activities. It implies there is a suitable stress value for each
of them. We want to engage in some activities initiatively and are obliged
to do others. The former has intrinsic stress while the latter an extrinsic.
Even in the same activity, some people want to do it under high tension,
while others want to do it in a relaxed manner. The paper introduces
activity contexts classified with 2 dimensions related to stress. One
dimension shows whether they are intrinsic or extrinsic, while the other
presents whether the stress value is appropriate. The paper proposes an
experimental method to discover the features of clothing that can improve
self-esteem through the analysis of data collected from an activity tracker.
Appropriate stress levels are considered to differ from person to person.
The proposed method records stress values per subject and activity context,
to calculate the appropriate stress value from the mean and variance of the
stress values. The method regards items of clothing that bring long-lasting
suitable stress values as ones that increase the self-esteem of the users
and improve their performance. If the characteristics of clothing that
improve self-esteem can be objectively identified from sensor data, a change
of clothing into identified one can help reduce feelings of hopelessness and
depression caused by low self-esteem. This method uses a multidimensional
emotional scale of clothing to represent the characteristics of clothing.
The experiment is carried out by collecting data using four questionnaires
on the multiple affective states generated by dressing, the activity
context, Rosenberg's self-esteem scale, and the apathy scale. The stress
values, heart rate, and activity intensity are also collected from an
activity tracker. The analysis is mainly based on the sensor data from the
activity tracker. It reduces the effort on the subjects during the
experiment.Sensor data on stress values from activity trackers are used as
an indicator related to self-esteem. The stress state appropriate to
activity status and clothes is predicted by a random forest model
constructed from real data. As a result, it is found that people wearing
clothing that makes them feel 'fulfilled' according to their assessment of
self-esteem are more likely to be in an appropriate state of stress.The
result is expected to play an effective means in alleviating symptoms of low
self-esteem and depression.