Personal sensing at work: Tracking burnout, balancing privacy

Personal sensing data could help monitor and alleviate stress among resident physicians, although privacy concerns over who sees the information and for what purposes must be addressed, according to collaborative research from Cornell Tech.

Burnout in all types of workplaces is on the rise in the U.S., where the “Great Resignation” and “silent quitting” have entered the lexicon in recent years. This is especially true in the health care industry, which has been strained beyond measure due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Stress is physical as well as mental, and evidence of stress can be measured through the use of smartphones, wearables and personal computers. But data collection and analysis — and the larger questions of who should have access to that information, and for what purpose — raise myriad sociotechnical questions.

“We’ve looked at whether we can measure stress in workplaces using these types of devices, but do these individuals actually want this kind of system? That was the motivation for us to talk to those actual workers,” said Daniel Adler, co-lead author with fellow doctoral student Emily Tseng of “Burnout and the Quantified Workplace: Tensions Around Personal Sensing Interventions for Stress in Resident Physicians,” published Nov. 11 Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction.

The paper is being presented at the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Social Computing, taking place virtually Nov. 8-22.

Adler and Tseng worked with senior author Tanzeem Choudhury, the Roger and Joelle Burnell Professor in Integrated Health and Technology at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech. Contributors came from Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell Health and Zucker Hillside Hospital.

Source: Read Full Article