FW-HTF-P: The Future of Workplace Wellness

工作场所健康计划正在增加。在美国商会最近的一份报告中，有报道称，绝大多数雇主致力于工作场所的健康。最近的研究表明，不同收入水平的员工的广泛参与是工作场所健康计划有效性的一个重要因素。研究发现，收入分配中较低端员工的参与率较低，而收入较高、健康状况良好的员工参与率较高。这表明，工作场所健康计划将成本转移到医疗保健支出较高、健康习惯较差的低收入员工身上。在这种背景下，为了满足未来的企业健康需求，使用廉价的传感技术、新的工作场所设计和人工智能(AI)工具是一个重要的机会，这些工具一起可以为员工的工作空间提供新的解决方案，并帮助满足对扩展健康实践的日益增长的需求。该项目展望了工作场所健康的未来--嵌入到日常生活中，通过支持人工智能的见解增强能力，通过强大的基于实时媒体的反馈方法进行参与，通过涵盖传感器、算法、产品和工业设计的综合设计方法使其变得经济实惠。我们的跨学科项目汇集了工程学、健康科学、经济学、设计和媒体艺术等多个学科。我们整合了使用可穿戴设备的低功耗传感等新兴技术，以开发主体活动的衡量标准，以改进个性化健康协议。我们将开发人工智能方法，将低级传感器数据转换为与健康指标相关的临床相关特征的替代品。将开发新的工作空间人体工学设计，并配备与健康相关的仪器，旨在达到更高的健康建议遵从性。将开发使用基于实时媒体的环境听觉和基于触觉的方法的生物反馈，以长期快乐地参与到健康中来。与此同时，健康教练将参与技术解决方案的设计和开发；不仅要了解它们是如何工作的，而且要了解它们的优势和劣势，并与设计师和技术专家密切合作，帮助构建它们的开发方案。最后，我们将制定新的措施和指标，包括人工智能技术对生产率提高带来的潜在收益的经济影响。我们项目的未来发展将导致基于对人类行为和健康的经验知识的企业健康计划。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Workplace wellness programs are on the rise. In a recent report by the US Chamber of Commerce, it was reported that a large majority of employers are committed to workplace wellness. Recent research shows that broad participation by employees, across the full spectrum of income levels, is a large factor for the effectiveness of workplace wellness programs. Studies have found that participation from employees on the lower end of the income distribution was low, while participation from higher income employees with good health practices was high. This suggests that workplace wellness programs shift costs onto low-income employees with high health care spending and poor health habits. In this context, to address future corporate wellness need, there is a significant opportunity for using inexpensive sensing technology, new workplace designs, and artificial intelligence (AI) tools that together can deliver new solutions into employees’ workspaces, and help address the growing need for scaling wellness practices. This project envisions the future of workplace wellness as embedded, engaging, empowering, and economical -- embedded into daily routines, empowered via AI enabled insights, engaging via powerful real-time media-based feedback approaches, and made economical by a comprehensive design approach spanning sensors, algorithms, product, and industrial design. Our interdisciplinary project brings together disciplines as wide as engineering, health sciences, economics, design, and media-arts. We integrate emerging technologies like low-power sensing using wearables to develop measures of subject activity to improve personalized wellness protocols. We will develop AI methods to convert low-grade sensor data, to surrogates of clinically relevant features that correlate with health metrics. New ergonomic designs of workspaces will be developed, with wellness relevant instrumentation, aimed at reaching higher compliance with wellness recommendations. Biofeedback using real-time media-based ambient auditory and haptic-based methods will be developed for long-term joyful engagement with wellness. At the same time, wellness coaches will participate in the design and development of the technology solutions; not just to understand how they work, but to appreciate their strengths and weaknesses, and help structure their development in close collaboration with designers and technologists. Finally, we will develop new measures and metrics, including economic impacts of AI techniques on potential gains from increased productivity. The future development of our project will lead to corporate wellness programs based on experience-based knowledge of human behavior and health.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.