ICT-BASED SOLUTION FOR IMPROVING OLDER ADULT WORKERS’ HEALTH

Abstract

Monitoring aging workers' health is important not only to prevent illness or work injury but to improve their quality of working life. In this article, we contribute to a deep understanding of the Romanian older adult workers as user experience while interacting with a smart ICT-based solution for monitoring physical activity and lifting effort. We want to see if using the proposed smart-insole system can help them to preserve their back health by avoiding problematic lifting during work. We share the key findings of a face-to-face survey with a small number of older adults with work experience in the medical field. We collected information on usability and easy-to-use, also further improvements to be used for advanced prototyping and scale-up of the product. Finally, participants are positive that wearing the system could be a helpful tool in avoiding back pain, not only for detecting problems but for changing their way of lifting, in a long term. This could be beneficial for workers' quality of life and promote health at work.

Keywords

• health behaviour
• back pain management
• preventive health at work