Designing Mindful Intervention with Therapeutic Music on Earables to Manage Occupational Fatigue

For instructions on how to apply, please see: PhD Studentships: UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Socially Intelligent Artificial Agents.

Supervisors:

• Fahim Kawsar: Nokia Bell Labs
• Tanaya Guha: School of Computing Science

Remember the moments when you find yourself tweaking the same line of code over and over or find yourself reading the same paragraph again and again! Those are the moments when your brain was overtaxed or – clinically – you had an acute mental fatigue episode.

While effective fatigue mitigation strategy is a subject of intense research, recent studies have shown that therapeutic music can help mitigate fatigue and the associated sleep disorder and memory decline. In this research, we ask – what contributes to mental fatigue and aspire to devise techniques to measure these factors using sensory earables accurately? Next, we ask what makes music therapeutic and aim to study therapeutic features of music towards the automatic transformation of songs and music to their therapeutic versions. Finally, we want to bring these two facets together, i.e., identifying and predicting fatigue episodes and contextually offering mindful intervention to help manage fatigue with therapeutic music.

We will leverage sensory earables for modeling fatigue building upon observed biomarkers and for real-time generation and playback of therapeutic music using acoustic channels. We will evaluate the developed solution initially in controlled lab settings followed by ecologically valid in-the-wild settings assessing both efficacy and usability of the solution.

We anticipate, our findings will uncover a set of unique physiological dynamics that explain why we feel what we feel and advocate the principles to design a practical fatigue management toolkit with earables.