WorkingAge: Providing Occupational Safety through Pervasive Sensing and Data Driven Behavior Modeling

The aging of the working population calls for innovative approaches to monitor and support the changes of physical, physiological and psycho-social capabilities of workers over time, as well as to promote habits aimed at improving both health and productivity. This paper presents the WorkingAge (Smart Working Environments for All Ages - WA) project, which focuses on innovative Human Computer Interaction methods (such as augmented and/or virtual reality or gesture/voice/noise recognition or gaze tracking) to improve the users’ psychological/emotional/health state at workplaces. Based on Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and on data driven models of the users' characteristics and behaviors, the WA Tool will monitor the state of users to automatically provide a set of suggestions promoting healthy habits in their working environment as well as in their daily living activities. The paper presents general concepts at the basis of the WA project, its hardware-software sensor architecture, and the elements of the ontology capturing the key concepts of the data collected to profile the users.