Principles for the design of digital occupational health systems

Abstract

There is a growing body of literature that addresses the importance of health and wellbeing in the workplace, and the effectiveness of corporate wellness programs. Following advancements in low-cost and unobtrusive computing technology, an emerging trend in corporate wellness programs is to offer wearable devices to employees. These devices monitor employees' physiological and environmental conditions in order to improve their awareness of their personal health. In addition, organizations can harness the aggregated anonymized data provided by such technology to investigate ways of improving the work environment. However, promoting digital health monitoring systems introduces new dynamic interactions between the social actors and technology. Three main categories of strain caused by the use of these systems in a work environment are value tensions (privacy vs. wellbeing); action tensions (work vs. leisure activities), and role tensions (leisure vs. work roles). Based on an analysis of these tensions, design principles for digital occupational health systems are derived that minimize strain and have much bigger chances to be accepted and thus to create value for all stakeholders. Consequently, this study follows the design science research paradigm to derive design principles.