CareCam: Concept of a New Tool for Corporate Health Management

Corporate health management is an important tool for preventing work-related absenteeism, increasing overall employee satisfaction and reducing the costs of absenteeism or presenteeism in the long term. Today, corporate health management is even more important because many employees work from home. Often, there is a lack of workspace or even a workplace that meets minimum occupational health and safety guidelines. Overwork, noise pollution, incorrect sitting posture and unstructured work breaks contribute negatively to the daily work routine, as does the general problem of separating work and leisure. Under these conditions, daily work is made even more difficult, which can lead to increased mental and physical stress. A concept for unobtrusive monitoring to increase long-term health, improve working conditions or at least to show the necessary adjustments to the new work situation can help to solve these problems. This paper presents a concept that shows how a simple webcam can be used to record essential vital signs during working hours, evaluate them using machine learning, and offer intervention recommendations based on these data to reduce psychological and physical stress. Work on continuous stress measurement and the challenges associated with it will be presented. This work serves as a starting point for the development of a camera-based tool for mental and physical stress measurement in theworkplace. Our approach demonstrates that the required parameters can be captured using a simple webcam and that interventions can be used to achieve long-term reductions in work-related mental and physical stress, provided that the proposed interventions are followed. The prototypical implementation shows that such a solution can work well in the workplace, but that data protection and technical limitations must be considered in the future in order to establish camera-based methods in the toolbox of workplace health management.