Just breathe: Towards real-time intervention for public speaking anxiety

Abstract Most speakers experience public speaking anxiety in one form or another, ranging from slight nervousness to paralyzing fear and panic. Public speaking anxiety negatively affects the quality of most presentations, but few people seek out treatments for their anxiety. Real-time public speaking anxiety interventions that assist presenters manage their anxiety during a presentation can be of use to many presenters. Motivated by research on deep breathing interventions for stress management, we conduct a study with eleven participants to explore designs for deep breathing interventions that can be used during a presentation in front of an audience. We developed and compared three prototypes that nudged presenters to perform different actions (deep breathing, pausing, or smiling and looking at the audience) during a presentation. We report on participants’ experience interacting with the prototypes and our findings on how sensor-driven technologies can nudge presenters to perform deep breathing as a just-in-time technique for reducing anxiety. Our findings reveal that such interventions should be automatically triggered by presenter anxiety level, use visual prompts that do not obscure the presentation content and be delivered at topic boundaries.