Kinetic Calendar for Emotional vs Physical Stress Tracking in Women

This work aims to address the need of creating visualization tools for better self-awareness of not visible daily life conditions, such as stress and emotional peaks, to facilitate the detection of patterns that could be related to some physical symptoms. It is focused on women because of the constant hormonal changes and the close relation of these with stress responses; and the fact that women are more likely to present psychosomatic disorders. Women who reported been affected with this condition, remembered not being able to relate the emotional cause of the symptom until after the diagnose. That would usually trigger a vicious cycle of stress and frustration that would worsen symptom. In the literature review it was found that psychosomatic disorders affect women in a 2:1 ratio compared to male pairs, due to biological, socio-economic, and cultural differences. It was also found that emotional self-awareness might decrease somatic related symptoms and that heart rate variability might be a valuable tool in the target tracking of users’ physical conditions in a near future. This kind of tools might not only serve as visual feedback but also it can help the physicians to detect patterns or relations for some common mental-related affections.