Ioannis Pavlidis, University of Houston
Talk Title: “Hidden micro-stressors: It’s the little things that count”
Abstract: Recent advances in affective computing and data science methods, enabled the harvesting and analysis of massive multimodal data from naturalistic studies, where people are researched inside-out as they go about their daily lives. Here I report relevant results from a series of naturalistic driving studies that my lab carried out in collaboration with the Texas A&M Transportation Institute. Shadowing dozens of IRB-consented subjects, during their daily driving and non-driving activities, we arrived at two important conclusions: First, we documented that there is a significant minority among drivers who consistently exhibit hyperarousals in mundane acceleration events, such as stop and go traffic. On average, these hyperarousals are 46% over the subjects’ baselines, and thus qualify as strong stressors. Second, we documented the effects of daily driving on cardiovascular loading. Using the subjects’ own smartphones and smartwatches, we monitored for a week both their driving and non-driving activities. Monitoring included the continuous recording of a) heart rate throughout the day, b) hand motion during driving as a proxy of distractions, and c) contextualized driving data, complete with traffic and weather information. These high temporal resolution variables were complemented with the drivers’ biographic and psychometric profiles. Our analysis suggests that anxiety predisposition and high speeds incur on drivers significantly higher cardiovascular loading, which if sustained, is on par with well-documented long-term health risk factors. These findings call for attention to hidden pernicious effects of daily human-machine interactions.