A case study of an employee portal with integrated physical-activity monitoring

In this paper we present some results of ongoing work on a case study that combines an employee portal with the monitoring of physical activity of the employee during his working time. The essence of this case study is to show how information about the worker´s individual physical activity can be presented online in a comprehensive way together with the actual portal information. This allows not only the employee, but also therapists and health consultants to analyze physical activity and rest periods during the work in conjunction with the corresponding work description. The purpose of our case study is to promote physical activity as a key employee health management strategy. And for this, our results show that even with low cost and little technical effort, current mobile and web technologies can simplify the acquisition of sensor data and the integration into existing systems. We want to motivate especially small and middle-sized companies to consider the integration of physical-activity monitoring to preserve the health and well-being of their employees. Promoting the employees health is an investment in the company´s human capital and can reduce the risk of i.e. Diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. In opposite to large enterprises where health-management has been well established, small companies can often not effort the cost for enterprise health and prevention management systems and the implementation by specialists. We have developed a lightweight Web API that provides easy access to the physical-activity data and function for visualization. We demonstrate how the API is applied together with the employee portal.