FW-HTF-P: The Future of Workplace Wellness

工作场所的健康项目正在增加。美国商会（US Chamber of Commerce）最近的一份报告显示，绝大多数雇主都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，收入分配较低端的雇员的参与率较低，而具有良好健康习惯的高收入雇员的参与率较高。这表明，工作场所健康计划将成本转嫁给了医疗保健支出高、健康习惯差的低收入员工。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，它们可以共同为员工的工作空间提供新的解决方案，并帮助满足不断增长的健康实践需求。该项目设想未来的工作场所健康是嵌入式的、引人入胜的、赋权的和经济的——嵌入到日常生活中，通过人工智能支持的洞察力，通过强大的基于媒体的实时反馈方法进行参与，并通过涵盖传感器、算法、产品和工业设计的综合设计方法实现经济。我们的跨学科项目汇集了工程、健康科学、经济学、设计和媒体艺术等广泛的学科。我们整合了新兴技术，如使用可穿戴设备的低功耗传感，以开发受试者活动的测量方法，以改善个性化的健康方案。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。将开发新的符合人体工程学的工作空间设计，配备与健康相关的仪器，旨在更好地遵守健康建议。利用基于实时媒体的环境听觉和触觉方法的生物反馈将被开发用于长期快乐地参与健康。与此同时，健康教练将参与技术解决方案的设计和开发；不仅要了解它们的工作原理，还要了解它们的优点和缺点，并与设计师和技术人员密切合作，帮助构建它们的开发结构。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力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人类行为和健康的经验知识的企业健康计划。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.