Personalized support for well-being at work: an overview of the SWELL project (original) (raw)
Related papers
Sensing and Changing Human Behavior for Workplace Wellness
Journal of Information Processing
Recently, companies have begun to care more about the well-being of their employees. With the spread of sensors, the Internet of Things, and artificial intelligence, the movement to build a better working environment by utilizing these technologies has been spreading. Especially, research on behavior that can change lifestyle habits is becoming popular. In this paper, we summarize workplace behavior research and projects for sensing and changing human behavior in a workplace and aim to improve the productivity and wellness of employees. Also, we introduce concepts for future workplaces and some of our related achievements. For physical state sensing, we have developed a continuous posture-sensing chair, which will soon be available commercially. For internal state sensing, we propose a method for estimating quality of life with wearable sensors. Our system have already achieved to estimate QoL (Quality of Life) around 90% with only 9 questions. In addition, we propose interactive digital signage to provide habit-changing reminders. Through one month experiment, we confirmed that our system can be feasible in daily life.
JMIR mHealth and uHealth, 2016
Background: Stress in office environments is a big concern, often leading to burnout. New technologies are emerging, such as easily available sensors, contextual reasoning, and electronic coaching (e-coaching) apps. In the Smart Reasoning for Well-being at Home and at Work (SWELL) project, we explore the potential of using such new pervasive technologies to provide support for the self-management of well-being, with a focus on individuals' stress-coping. Ideally, these new pervasive systems should be grounded in existing work stress and intervention theory. However, there is a large diversity of theories and they hardly provide explicit directions for technology design. Objective: The aim of this paper is to present a comprehensive and concise framework that can be used to design pervasive technologies that support knowledge workers to decrease stress. Methods: Based on a literature study we identify concepts relevant to well-being at work and select different work stress models to find causes of work stress that can be addressed. From a technical perspective, we then describe how sensors can be used to infer stress and the context in which it appears, and use intervention theory to further specify interventions that can be provided by means of pervasive technology. Results: The resulting general framework relates several relevant theories: we relate "engagement and burn-out" to "stress", and describe how relevant aspects can be quantified by means of sensors. We also outline underlying causes of work stress and how these can be addressed with interventions, in particular utilizing new technologies integrating behavioral change theory. Based upon this framework we were able to derive requirements for our case study, the pervasive SWELL system, and we implemented two prototypes. Small-scale user studies proved the value of the derived technology-supported interventions. Conclusions: The presented framework can be used to systematically develop theory-based technology-supported interventions to address work stress. In the area of pervasive systems for well-being, we identified the following six key research challenges and opportunities: (1) performing multidisciplinary research, (2) interpreting personal sensor data, (3) relating measurable aspects to burnout , (4) combining strengths of human and technology, (5) privacy, and (6) ethics.
SenseX: Design and Deployment of a Pervasive Wellness Monitoring Platform for Workplaces
Service-Oriented Computing, 2015
With the increasing number of desk jobs, workplaces have become the epicentre of several health risks. In this paper, we design and develop a pervasive wellness monitoring platform, SenseX, that uses a variety of devices and sensors to track physical activity level of employees in an organization. SenseX platform offers APIs which can be used by 3rd party applications to create services and applications, which can focus on specific interventions (e.g. to reduce prolonged sitting). We performed a real-world evaluation of the platform by deploying it in an IT organization for 6 weeks and observed longitudinal variations. We believe that SenseX platform helps in realizing the vision of "wellness as a service" in modern workplaces, enabling multitudes of different wellness services, which will be a key for sustained adoption of wellness programs.
HealthyOffice: Mood Recognition At Work Using Smartphones and Wearable Sensors
—Stress, anxiety and depression in the workplace are detrimental to human health and productivity with significant financial implications. Recent research in this area has focused on the use of sensor technologies, including smartphones and wearables embedded with physiological and movement sensors. In this work, we explore the possibility of using such devices for mood recognition, focusing on work environments. We propose a novel mood recognition framework that is able to identify five intensity levels for eight different types of moods every two hours. We further present a smartphone app ('HealthyOffice'), designed to facilitate self-reporting in a structured manner and provide our model with the ground truth. We evaluate our system in a small-scale user study where wearable sensing data is collected in an office environment. Our experiments exhibit promising results allowing us to reliably recognize various classes of perceived moods.
Proceedings of the 5th EAI International Conference on Wireless Mobile Communication and Healthcare - "Transforming healthcare through innovations in mobile and wireless technologies", 2015
There is a current trend of wearable sensing with regards to health. Wearable sensors and devices allow us to monitor various aspects of our lives. Through this monitoring, wearable systems can utilise data to positively influence an individual's overall health and wellbeing. We envisage a future where technology can effectively help us to become fitter and healthier, but the current state of wearables and future directions are unclear. In this paper, we present an overview of current methods used within wearable applications to monitor and support positive health and wellbeing within an individual. We then highlight issues and challenges outlined by previous studies and describe the future focuses of work.
Survey of Sensor-Based Personal Wellness Management Systems
BioNanoScience, 2013
The cost of health care is expected to grow enormously in the coming years. To keep these costs limited, we need better technological tools for self-monitoring and independent aging, and to put a stronger emphasis on wellness, defined as a balanced and healthy lifestyle that avoids diseases at every stage of life. In contrast to traditional medical science that examines patients in laboratories, wellness is determined by our activities, which have so far been difficult to measure objectively. This situation is changing due to the availability of wearable and pervasive sensors, smartphones and other body-worn devices that can capture and infer users activities. Technological advances in this area are rapidly pushing forward. The range of methods as well as the health domains where sensors have been used for monitoring is proliferating. This has created a unique opportunity to understand wellness in an integrative and balanced framework. The goal of this survey is to present the current technological capabilities in sensor technology and activitiy detection methods with the purpose of guiding researchers that are interested in developing wellness technology.
Empowering Citizens for Well-being and Chronic Disease Management With Wellness Diary
IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine, 2010
Chronic conditions closely related to lifestyles are the major cause of disability and death in the developed world. Behavior change is the key to managing well-being and preventing and managing chronic diseases. Wellness diary (WD) is a mobile application designed to support citizens in learning about their behavior, and both making and maintaining behavior changes. WD has been found acceptable, useful, and suitable for long-term use as a part of an intervention. When used independently, however, it does not seem to have enough engaging and motivating features to support adoption and long-term commitment. The main improvement needs identified based on a review of WD-related studies were: personalization of the application to individual needs, increasing motivation during early use, maintaining motivation, and aiding in relapse recovery in long-term use. We present concepts to improve the personalization of WD as well as improvements to the feedback and interpretation of the self-observation data. We also present usage models on how this type of mobile application could be utilized.
2011
Even though mental health is an important part of our well-being we believe that, so far, it has been overlooked in favour of physical health by most of the existing self-monitoring solutions. Our goal is to understand how we can better utilise technology to provide support for people with mental health problems and to gain a deeper insight to the challenges of designing solutions such as how user might effectively interact with such systems. This paper describes our system, the design challenges we have encountered, the decisions we have made and our ongoing work in terms of system design as well as usage experiments. 1
Design and Deployment of a Pervasive Wellness Monitoring Platform for Workplaces
ICSOC 2015
With the increasing number of desk jobs, workplaces have become the epicenter of several health risks. In this paper, we design and develop a pervasive wellness monitoring platform, SenseX , that uses a variety of devices and sensors to track physical activity level of employees in an organization. SenseX platform offers APIs which can be used by 3rd party applications to create services and applications, which can focus on specific interventions (eg. to reduce prolonged sitting). We performed a real-world evaluation of the platform by deploying it in an IT organization for 6 weeks and observed longitudinal variations. We believe that SenseX platform helps in realizing the vision of “wellness as a service” in modern workplaces, enabling multitudes of different wellness services, which will be a key for sustained adoption of wellness programs.