Exploring Physical Activities in an Employer-Sponsored Health Program

Abstract

This work brings a perspective from an employersponsored health and wellness program called Global Corporate Challenge (GCC) to the 'quantified self' research. We present preliminary findings from a study with 17 university employees who participated in the GCC. We aimed to explore how participants derived meaningfulness from their self-tracking experiences. Our findings echo the growing body of work that advocates for conceptualizing activity tracking beyond the rationalistic, data-oriented perspectives and supporting more social and lived experiences.

Physiolytics at the workplace: Affordances and constraints of wearables use from an employee's perspective

“…Following Mukhopadhyay, Rajiv, and Srinivasan (1997), a technology's disruptiveness manifests in substantial changes of work processes. The introduction of physiolytics at the workplace, as demonstrated by exemplary prototypes in Table 1, exhibits features of disruptiveness due to the fact that it may significantly impact the design and execution of certain work activities (Cheng et al, 2013;Valero et al, 2016) and social structure among employees (Chung & Danis, 2016;Gorm & Shklovski, 2016;Vyas et al, 2015). Given that some of the presented applications scenarios entail severe organizational and cultural changes, considerable insecurities and unpredictable employee behaviour could result (Elie-Dit-Cosaque & Straub, 2011; Lapointe & Rivard, 2005).…”

“…In the same vein, other scholars (Chung & Danis, 2016;Glance, Ooi, Berman, & Glance, 2016;Gorm, 2016;Vyas et al, 2015) have reported on employer-sponsored health programs that include physical activity tracking in order to generally reduce physical inactivity. Physiolytics solutions in these programs, apart from pedometers, additionally include user-centred applications for the definition of goals, the reporting of goal achievements, and for performance benchmarking.…”

“…Literature review on physiolytics scenarios, prototypes, and system propertiesHealth Risk Exemplary Prototypes [outlet] Exemplary System PropertiesStress ▪ Solution for the purpose of detecting work-related stress of office workers by means of a wearable device(Han et al, 2017) [Computers in Industry] Digital activity tracker-based workplace(Glance et al, 2016) [CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ]▪ Reports of step count totals on individual, third party, and team level ▪ Physical activity tracking in an employer-sponsored health program(Vyas et al, 2015) [ACM Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems]…”

Integrating Population-based Patterns with Personal Routine to Re-engage Fitbit Use

“…These research findings have led employers to develop programs to promote walking for health among their employees [4] [16] [32]. In the short-term, these studies showed promising results, finding that social relationships in the organization affect employee inclination to participate [4] [16].…”

Health promotion with physiolytics: What is driving people to subscribe in a data-driven health plan

“…First, it has favored the idea that health is not a private matter anymore [5]. Given that "chronic diseases generate billions of dollars in avoidable health expenditure every year" [6], companies and governments alike have used this argument for political reasoning and actions [7], paving the way for large-scale (digital) organizational and public health prevention and promotion programs [8][9][10] which have fostered the belief that much disease is caused by unhealthy life choices and that there is a moral obligation to exercise healthy behavior to reduce the financial burden on society [11]. In this sense, engaging in unhealthy behavior or even worse-having a chronic disease due to years of personal neglect and misdemeanor-imposes a moral dilemma and guilt on citizens, arising from failure or incompetence to fulfil the inherent social norms.…”