**3.2 Collecting data on mental state and health**

Biometric data was collected using three Huawei Honor Band 6 smartwatches and two Fitbit Sense smartwatches. Each smartwatch measured:


These two variables were used by both types of watches to generate a so-called stress score (the latter pertinent to waking moments and arbitrarily indexed from 1 to 100).

*The Life2 Well Project: Investigating the Relationship between Physiological Stress… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.107493*

#### **Figure 1.**

*Schematic of sensors for the wearable.*

#### **Figure 2.** *Assembled wearable device..*

In addition, the Fitbit Sense watches were able to measure:


Heart rate variability was – in turn – indicated through the variables of:

• Root mean square of successive differences between successive beat-to-beat intervals (rMSSD)


Finally, the Fitbits used the duration of deep sleep, resting heart rate, and restlessness while supine, to suggest a sleep quality score (indexed from 1 to 100). According to Fitbit, this sleep score takes into account sleep duration, sleep quality, and restoration.

As a proxy for the state of mind of the five participants during their waking hours, they voluntarily self-reported against a ten-point Likert scale twice a day, once in the morning and the other before sleep. In earlier work by [17], it has been recognized that there is a high degree of connectivity among the neural structures of the brain and its systems. Emotions and cognition, although having separate features and influences, are dialectic, integrated and co-mingled in the brain. It has been suggested that emotions play a central role in the evolution of consciousness, influence the emergence of higher levels of awareness and largely determine the content and focus of consciousness throughout one's lifespan [17]. As such, by attempting to explore the connections between participants' feelings and corresponding biometric data, we can perhaps glimpse how participants respond physiologically and affectively when they are in a specific microclimate.

Given this background, the self-report online form consisted of four questions. Two questions invited the five participants to report their emotional and physical health based on prevailing microclimate at the time, against a ten-point Likert scale, while the other two questions invited them to elaborate on their respective responses in prose.
