Social isolation is having a significant impact on the quality of life, physical activity, and sleep patterns of our population. While self-isolation and social distancing provide the most successful method for limiting the progression and spread of infectious diseases like COVID-19, we often overlook the impact of these rules on our population. This impact is also observed in individuals working from home, which in addition to struggling with isolation, also need to cope with lack of necessary resources for a healthy work environment (e.g. lack of basic equipment, lack of physical activity during work hours, improper sleep, lack of quiet and comfortable work environment). However, such impact is currently not fully understood.
In this project, our research team aims to develop a data ecosystem to use consumer-level technologies such as fitness trackers and wearables to support public health decision making. We will use the COVID-19 pandemic as a testing scenario for the technology, exploring the data to improve our understanding of the impact that social-isolation had on: (1) population levels of physical activity and sleep, and (2) quality of the work experience for employees working from home. We will monitor the impact of quarantine rules on household-level and individual-level physical activity (e.g., duration, type, intensity), sleep quality (e.g., duration and disturbed sleep patterns), mental health (e.g., users’ self-assessment of depression and general functioning). The same ecosystem will later be leveraged in the second phase of this project to implement a commercial solution capable of interpreting employee-owned wearable and IoT data to provide recommendations for services and equipment to improve work from home conditions.
The proposed ecosystem has the major advantage of collecting data from devices that are extremely popular by Canadians, and will support near real-time data collection, de-identification of data and consent management for data collection to ensure security and privacy of individuals. The ecosystem will also be flexible enough to allow new devices and sensors to be added as technologies developed, creating one centralized solution for data collection from wearables and IoT devices.
Project members:
Pedro Elkind Velmovitsky, PhD
Last updated: April 07, 2021