In a world where technological advances are progressing at a vertiginous pace, social networks, online games, virtual worlds, streaming services and remote work are part of everyday life. And tasks that used to be repetitive or took long days to be carried out, are nowadays executed by machines, bots or artificial agents that optimize processes depending on the implementation environment. Such is the case of the work environment, where the use of technological tools has not only optimized the work of people but also the reduction of effort and a better use of resources, even expanding work activities to environments outside the office such as homes.
Although the benefits of the above are visible today, some negative aspects have also been potentiated, such is the case of stress and its effects on people's occupational health. A global problem that increasingly affects more and more human lives, and despite multiple efforts from different areas, still requires a lot of work to be controlled, due to the variety of causes of stress to which an individual may be subjected and the multiple effects on human life. It is here, where technology finds an opportunity to contribute with alternatives to counteract the effects associated with this so-called modern disease, for example, the use of affective computing in competition with various areas of knowledge, such as psychology, medicine, sociology and other related sciences, positioning the human beyond being a mere user of technological devices and tools, to being the core of the entire process.
For this reason, the present study observes the effects that stimuli such as blue light and relaxing music can have on people who perform stressful activities in a work environment, in front of a computing device. To this end, the state of the art and its impact on stress is explored, where 35 participants were exposed to an experiment, randomly distributed in groups characterized by the type of stimulus used, 11 for music, 12 for light and 12 for the combination of music and light. By monitoring physiological indicators such as Hearth Rate Variability (HRV) and ElectroDermal Activity (EDA) and psychological indicators of self-perceived stress such as the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) and the Self Assessment Manikin (SAM), it is possible to obtain results that demonstrate how the use of such stimuli generate positive effects on the stress levels of the participants.
To this end, the design, implementation and execution of a software tool that involves the various stages of the experiment was carried out, allowing to group the data collected from the experimental exercise, for its subsequent analysis. This contributes to the area of affective computing, giving a broader perspective of the use of tools that allow to improve the quality of life of people from the technological point of view.
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