VTT and Healthzilla to Collaborate on A Workplace Wellness Centred Project
VTT - the Technical Research Centre of Finland - and Healthzilla will collaborate on a workplace wellness centred project. The commercial (sub-)project is part of an ongoing international Mad@Work project, the goal of which is to create means to measure physical & mental (dis)comfort, and tools that help to create better, productive conditions for knowledge work. Healthzilla’s role is to help VTT to explore multiple sensing solutions for measuring and monitoring employee wellbeing in the project.
“When creating practical solutions for workplaces, it is important to understand that conditions and circumstances vary and a solution relying heavily on some specific aspects is not necessarily a good design. This is true for AI-based solutions as well - we could rely on single sensor-based source of data for stress measurement, but what if that source is not available, either because the workplace cannot deploy it, or it is temporarily not there?”, says Atte Kinnula, Research Team Lead at VTT. “In addition, detecting stress unobtrusively is challenging endeavour. We believe, and research corroborates with this, that using multiple different types of data will also improve the accuracy of stress detection. Thirdly, while stress is somewhat easier to detect using wearable technologies such as wrist devices measuring your heart beat, in practice this is not a universally used device - some use it regularly, others occasionally when they remember to charge it, and many don’t like to use such devices at all. This is why in Mad@Work we focus on sensors that are embedded in the environment rather than personal sensors such as wearables. However, this may bring along acceptability and trust issues - can you be certain your data is not misused if the thing collecting the data is not yours? Here Healthzilla has taken an interesting approach as in their toolbox they also have a solution that utilises sensors and capabilities of a device that can be considered “environment-embedded” in that it is ubiquitous, yet it is also personal - the mobile phone. Using Healthzilla’s solution gives us an opportunity to explore this grey area between the two sensing approaches and see how it fits in the mix. Healthzilla’s service also provides recovery feedback to the users and this gives us an opportunity to look into the correlation of the feedback vs. experienced and measured stress, as well as see in a relatively long pilot study if there is a difference in engagement between those who get the feedback vs. those who did not use Healthzilla’s services”, Atte concludes.
“We are more than delighted to collaborate with VTT in this important project. With our state-of-the-art platform solution VTT can monitor the impact of daily recovery analysis and feedback in optimizing stress management and recovery of the participants in the project”, rejoices Laura Ranin, CEO of Healthzilla. “Together with VTT we are eager to learn how the increased awareness of the participants’ recovery status based on their biometric data analysis and feedback will support as well as promote stress management and recovery in the context of workplace wellness.”
The collaboration between VTT and Healthzilla will kick off towards the end to the year and will last for 3-4 months followed by further analyses of the data collected.
More about VTT: VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd is a state owned and controlled non-profit limited liability company which provides research and innovation services and information for domestic and international customers and partners, both in private and public sectors. VTT is a visionary research, development and innovation partner that drives sustainable growth and tackles the biggest global challenges of our time turning them into opportunities for business growth.
More about Mad@Work project: The international project focuses on detecting and mitigating poor mental health conditions, such as work stress and burnout, which have not yet resulted in a diagnosed mental health disorder. The Mad@Work project aims at a significant breakthrough in the development of software-intensive applications that combine multiple heterogeneous environmental and/or wearable data sources into actionable information for improving employees’ wellbeing, engagement, and performance. Mad@Work will develop truly unobtrusive, privacy-safe, appealing solutions, smoothly integrated into the work environment and appropriate for long-term use in diverse real-life settings.