Biocueing in daily life – physiological triggers for stress assessment and intervention

Job description

The experience of stress is an inherent part of daily life. As a PhD student in the Stress in Action project, your mission is to turn the Stress in Action toolkit from a passive measurement of the physiological stress response into a system that can act on it.

Consumer wearables such as smartwatches and rings now record heart rate and movement continuously in daily life. Using the biocue 'additional heart rate', which separates heart-rate increases caused by psychological stress from those caused by physical activity and posture, you will investigate, implement and test physiological triggers that send experience-sampling questions, or a brief intervention, at the moment a stress response is detected.

You will start by reviewing how physiological signals have been used to trigger experience-sampling questions and just-in-time interventions, and by contributing to the Stress in Action wearables database. You will then establish whether such triggers can run in (near) real time on the wearable and experience-sampling platforms that Stress in Action uses, and test their validity in an intensive two-week measurement study in which check-ins are triggered by participants' own physiology. Because triggering only works if people accept and understand the cues they receive, you will also study the user experience of being cued. Using the large daily-life datasets of the Stress in Action cohort, you will compare which signals and threshold settings make the best triggers, and in the final phase you will design and pilot a first context-sensitive stress intervention delivered at detected moments of stress.

Your thesis will deliver a practical, evidence-based triggering pipeline to the Stress in Action toolkit as the foundation for its just-in-time adaptive interventions.

Your profile

• An MSc degree in biological, health or human factors psychology, health sciences, biomedical technology, human-computer interaction, technical medicine, computer or data science, or a related discipline (candidates close to graduating are encouraged to apply)
• A strong interest in ambulatory (psycho)physiological research, wearable technology and the design of technology-supported stress interventions
• Programming skills in Python, R or similar for physiological signal analysis and for working with wearable and app platforms, and affinity with multilevel modelling or machine learning on intensive longitudinal data
• Affinity with user research (interviews, co-design) and experience with app-based data collection are an advantage
• Affinity with, and preferably experience in, writing research papers
• Excellent English conversation, writing and presentation skills, and the communication and social skills to work with participants and in an interdisciplinary, multi-university team

Our offer

• A full-time position for four years, with a qualifier in the first year, and the flexibility to work (partially) from home.
• Your salary and associated conditions are in accordance with the collective labour agreement for Dutch universities (CAO-NU).
• You will receive a gross monthly salary ranging from €3.204 (first year) to €4.051 ,- (fourth year) (filled in by HR).
• There are excellent benefits including a holiday allowance of 8% of the gross annual salary, an end-of-year bonus of 8.3%, and a solid pension scheme.
• A minimum of 232 leave hours in case of full-time employment based on a formal workweek of 38 hours. A full-time employment in practice means 40 hours a week, therefore resulting in 96 extra leave hours on an annual basis.
• Free access to sports facilities on campus.
• A family-friendly institution that offers parental leave (both paid and unpaid).
• You will have a training programme as part of the Twente Graduate School where you and your supervisors will determine a plan for a suitable education and supervision.
• Membership of a large and active national community of over 40 PhD students within the Stress in Action programme

Information and application

For more information regarding this position, you are welcome to contact Prof. Matthijs Noordzij, m.l.noordzij@utwente.nl. See this for more information about the Stress in Action project.

Please send your application via the UT vacancies page before 25-10-2026 and include a motivation letter, a detailed CV, and the names of two people we can contact for additional information.

Screening is part of the selection procedure.

About the department

The department of Psychology, Health and Technology (PHT) focuses on the development and evaluation of engaging, personalised and adaptive health interventions, and on measuring behaviour, emotion and physiology in daily life with wearables and experience-sampling methods. We have a strong culture of interdisciplinary research within the Faculty of Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences (BMS), contributing to faculty themes such as health and resilience, and we work closely with technological groups such as Industrial Design, Human-Media Interaction and Biomedical Signals and Systems in university-wide collaborations such as the TechMed Centre, the BMS Lab and the DesignLab.

This position is part of Stress in Action, in which over 100 multidisciplinary scientists from seven Dutch universities and university medical centers collaborate around the theme 'stress in daily life'. The consortium validates daily-life stress assessments, examines which contextual factors contribute to the experience of daily-life stress, and examines how daily-life stress leads to the development of mental and cardiometabolic diseases. Stress in Action is funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) under the Gravitation programme, and brings you into close contact with researchers from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam UMC, Erasmus Medical Center, the University of Groningen, UMC Groningen and Utrecht University.