Self-Assistant: Portable Progressive Muscle Relaxation Training Interface for Anxiety Reduction in Office Workers

Workload often triggers anxiety for office workers. While a variety of stress intervention and management techniques have been explored, there exist only a few of portable tangible interfaces for anxiety reduction. Contributing to the body of work, we introduce Self-Assistant, a portable anxiety intervention training interface. This is based on progressive muscle relaxation training which is an effective way for reducing stress and raise awareness of tension, and provide feelings of deep relaxation. This interface incorporates a stress ball with a pressure sensor and visual indicators which help track the user's anxiety level through squeeze actions. This is designed to help improve self-awareness of anxiety and stress, in turn self-regulating bodily functions, offering rapid and low-sensory stimulus training for anxiety relief. Finally, we discuss application scenarios and future work with Self-Assistant.