A Virtual Coach and a Worker Dashboard to Promote Well-Being and Workability: An Acceptance Study.

Behavioral monitoring tools can be proven to be especially helpful for aging workers for whom it is of paramount importance to avoid sedentary lifestyle, decreasing the possibility to exhibit musculoskeletal, cardiovascular and other health/mental related problems, which could impede their workability and job performance. Towards this direction, we have developed an unobtrusive pervasive health monitoring framework, enabling activity and location tracking, as well as self-reporting. The collected data is used to provide meaningful health-related suggestions through a life-like Virtual Coach aiming to encourage the engagement of workers with healthy lifestyle and behaviors. In this paper, we present the design and functionality of the solution, which was implemented as a mobile app accompanied with a dashboard for data overview, and demonstrate the results of its acceptance through a conducted survey. Survey participants were asked to answer questions related to their work experience, frequency of use of technology and type of applications used, well-being and satisfaction at work as well as their data privacy concerns. Finally, the participants also answered questions about the level of acceptance of the system and the perceived usefulness. Within the survey, video demonstrations and images were included, so that the participants have the chance to receive a better understanding of solution functionality. The acceptability study was conducted with the participation of 52 people, from which 90.4% reported that they found the Virtual Coach recommendations useful, while 84.6% reported intention of using the proposed solution in their daily life. The results indicate the virtue of such tools in promoting worker well-being.