MORElab - Opportunities and Challenges of Technology-based Interventions to Increase Health-awareness in the Workplace

Opportunities and Challenges of Technology-based Interventions to Increase Health-awareness in the Workplace

Authors

Abstract

Well-being at work is gaining an increasing importance on the overall health promotion as the workplace is considered an adequate setting to support health-related interventions reaching large audiences. In fact, an increasing number of initiatives are being carried out to influence employees towards healthier lifestyles in later years. However, despite demonstrating moderate efficacy, the body of literature shows that the lack of adherence of the target audience to the interventions is an important factor to overcome in order to attain higher success. To increase employees' motivation and prevent early drop-out, disengagement or high attrition rates, this work presents an intervention methodology based on the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. Specifically, it presents a novel concept of a participatory worker-centric IoT solution for enhancing individuals' well-being in office environments. This approach seeks to stress the significance of empowering workers providing to them fine-grained control of their own well-being and self-care which correlates to higher rates of participation in health promotion initiatives. Along this chapter the main challenges associated with the design and development of technology-based interventions are reviewed. Moreover, the value of increasing the acceptance and adoption of the presented IoT approach from the employee's perspective is analyzed in a comprehensive manner.