Toward Tailoring Just-in-Time Adaptive Intervention Systems for Workplace Stress Reduction: Exploratory Analysis of Intervention Implementation
Authors: Suh Jina , Howe Esther , Lewis Robert , Hernandez Javier , Saha Koustuv , Althoff Tim , Czerwinski Mary 
Published: July 2024

Background

Integrating stress-reduction interventions into the workplace may improve the health and well-being of employees, and there is an opportunity to leverage ubiquitous everyday work technologies to understand dynamic work contexts and facilitate stress reduction wherever work happens. Sensing-powered just-in-time adaptive intervention (JITAI) systems have the potential to adapt and deliver tailored interventions, but such adaptation requires a comprehensive analysis of contextual and individual-level variables that may influence intervention outcomes and be leveraged to drive the system’s decision-making.

Objective

This study aims to identify key tailoring variables that influence momentary engagement in digital stress reduction microinterventions to inform the design of similar JITAI systems.

Methods

To inform the design of such dynamic adaptation, we analyzed data from the implementation and deployment of a system that incorporates passively sensed data across everyday work devices to send just-in-time stress reduction microinterventions in the workplace to 43 participants during a 4-week deployment. We evaluated 27 trait-based factors (ie, individual characteristics), state-based factors (ie, workplace contextual and behavioral signals and momentary stress), and intervention-related factors (ie, location and function) across 1585 system-initiated interventions. We built logistical regression models to identify the factors contributing to momentary engagement, the choice of interventions, the engagement given an intervention choice, the user rating of interventions engaged, and the stress reduction from the engagement.

Results

We found that women (odds ratio [OR] 0.41, 95% CI 0.21-0.77; P=.03), those with higher neuroticism (OR 0.57, 95% CI 0.39-0.81; P=.01), those with higher cognitive reappraisal skills (OR 0.69, 95% CI 0.52-0.91; P=.04), and those that chose calm interventions (OR 0.43, 95% CI 0.23-0.78; P=.03) were significantly less likely to experience stress reduction, while those with higher agreeableness (OR 1.73, 95% CI 1.10-2.76; P=.06) and those that chose prompt-based (OR 6.65, 95% CI 1.53-36.45; P=.06) or video-based (OR 5.62, 95% CI 1.12-34.10; P=.12) interventions were substantially more likely to experience stress reduction. We also found that work-related contextual signals such as higher meeting counts (OR 0.62, 95% CI 0.49-0.78; P<.001) and higher engagement skewness (OR 0.64, 95% CI 0.51-0.79; P<.001) were associated with a lower likelihood of engagement, indicating that state-based contextual factors such as being in a meeting or the time of the day may matter more for engagement than efficacy. In addition, a just-in-time intervention that was explicitly rescheduled to a later time was more likely to be engaged with (OR 1.77, 95% CI 1.32-2.38; P<.001).

Conclusions

JITAI systems have the potential to integrate timely support into the workplace. On the basis of our findings, we recommend that individual, contextual, and content-based factors be incorporated into the system for tailoring as well as for monitoring ineffective engagements across subgroups and contexts.