A case study of an employee portal with integrated physical-activity monitoring

In this paper we present some results of our ongoing work on a pilot study that combines an employee portal with the monitoring of physical activity of employees during work. The purpose of our study is to promote physical activity as a key employee health management strategy. This allows not only the employee, but also therapists and health consultants to analyse physical activity and rest periods during the work in conjunction with the corresponding work descriptions. The essence is to show how information about the worker's individual physical activity can be presented online in a comprehensive way together with the actual portal information. Our results show that even with low cost and little technical effort, current mobile and web technologies can simplify the acquisition of sensor data and the integration into existing systems. The aim is to motivate small and middle-sized companies to consider the utilization of physical-activity monitoring as a reasonable method to preserve health and well-being of their employees. Promoting the employees health is an investment in the company's human capital and can reduce the risk of i.e. Diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. In opposite to large enterprises where health-management has been well established, small companies can often not effort the cost for enterprise health and prevention management systems and the implementation by specialists. For this purpose, we have developed a prototype employee-portal with integrated physical-activity monitoring functions. Based on the measured activity-data the worker can see intuitively important information about his daily physical-activity at the same place where he obtains all his work-related information (work schedule, vehicles, machines etc.). Thus the user does not need to login into any other software system and can save time. For a more general approach, we introduce our Activity Web-API that we are currently working on. It provides an easy access to the physical-activity data and visualization functions from any Web-based application. Using a standard mobile-phone and the Web-API reduces not only the technical barrier but also encourages entrepreneurs and employees to make increasingly use of physical-activity monitoring for a more balanced and healthy life. As an example, we show activity-data that was measured during a working day by a field worker of the research partner FMG GmbH & Co. KG (FMG company) [1.], a SME in the telecommunication service industry.