Stress in Action aims to move stress research from the lab to daily life, capitalizing on the fast advances in technology and big data analytics. It is an NWO Gravitation project that was awarded in 2022 and will run for 10 years. The consortium enables synergistic collaborations to discover 1) how responses to daily life stress arise from the temporal, dynamic interplay between context and person-specific factors, 2) how daily life stress can be reliably measured in a specific individual in real-time, and 3) how and when potential beneficial stress-response mechanisms turn into detrimental effects on mental and cardiometabolic health. This enables the development of novel monitoring and intervention strategies to track and reduce daily life stress and its health impact.
University of Twente is primarily involved in Research Theme 2 (RT2) on assessment of stress in daily life for monitoring and intervention. The UTwente team is lead by co-PI Prof. Matthijs Noordzij. The goal of RT2 is to develop increasingly sophisticated versions of a cutting-edge, low-burden, ecologically valid ambulatory assessment toolkit to quantify stress in daily life, and to design, test, and iteratively improve stress interventions using that toolkit. I will supervise a research position that will start in the later years, possibly in connection with the other gravitation programmes that I am involved with, namely Hybrid Intelligence and Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies.