Academic Awards 2025 booklet

71 Caring for Caregivers: Monitoring Mental Well-being in Healthcare Workers and Teachers Through AI Healthcare workers and teachers are invaluable to our society. However, these professions face severe understaffing and overwhelming workloads, leading to significant stress and burnout. One-third to half of the employees show signs of burnout. Unfortunately, current methods to monitor mental well-being are used infrequently and often rely on cumbersome questionnaires, providing only occasional snapshots of employees’ mental well-being. With the Caring for Caregivers project, we used the Hummin’ system to monitor mental well-being. With Hummin’, users can report feelings of gratitude or vulnerability through a clickable button or app, helping them become more aware of their emotional state. The system was tested and evaluated at a school and a care facility, showing that Hummin’ can boost self-awareness and psychological safety. We also trained machine learning models on the data collected through Hummin’, along with demographic information, to predict burnout and stress using AI, with mixed results. This project contributes to ongoing, near real-time monitoring of mental well-being, which could help detect and prevent burnout earlier. Figure 1: With the Hummin’ system, you can self-report feelings of gratitude and vulnerability through an app or clickable button. Figure 2: The trends of feeling grateful and vulnerable can encourage self-reflection and were used to explore if they could be used to predict burnout.