Light enables us to see and perceive our environment but it also initiates effects beyond vision, such as alertness. Literature describes that at least six factors are relevant for initiating effects beyond vision. The exact relationship between these factors and alertness is not yet fully understood. In the current field study, personal lighting conditions of 62 Dutch office workers (aged 49.7 ± 11.4 years) were continuously measured and simultaneously self-reported activities and locations during the day were gathered via diaries. Each office worker participated 10 working days in spring 2017. Personal lighting conditions were interpreted based on four of the six factors (light quantity, spectrum, timing, and duration of light exposure). Large individual differences were found for the daily luminous exposures, illuminances, correlated colour temperatures, and irradiances measured with the blue sensor area of the dosimeter. The average illuminance (over all participants and all days) over the course of the day peaked three times. The analysis of the duration of light exposure demonstrated that the participants were on average only exposed to an illuminance above 1000 lx for 72 minutes per day. The interpretation of personal lighting conditions based on the four factors provides essential information since all of these factors may be relevant for initiating effects beyond vision. The findings in the current paper give first in-depth insight in the possibilities to interpret personal lighting conditions of office workers.
MULTIFILE
Eating healthier at work can substantially promote health for office workers. However, little has been investigated on designing pervasive health interventions specialized in improving workday eating patterns. This paper presents a design study of an mHealth app called EAT@WORK, which was designed to support office workers in the Netherlands in developing healthy eating behaviors in work routines. Based on semi-structured interviews with 12 office workers from a variety of occupations, we synthesized four key features for EAT@WORK, including supporting easy access to relevant knowledge, assisting goal setting, integrating with health programs, and facilitating peer supports. The user acceptance of EAT@WORK was examined through a within-subject study with 14 office workers, followed by a qualitative study on the applicability of app features to different working contexts. Quantitative results showed that EAT@WORK was experienced more useful than a benchmark app (p < 0.01) and EAT@WORK was also perceived easier to use than the benchmark app (p < 0.01). The qualitative analysis suggested that the goal assistant feature could be valuable for different working contexts, while the integrated health program was considered more suitable for office work than telework. The social and knowledge support were expected to be on-demand features that should loosely be bonded with the working contexts. Based on these findings, we discuss design implications for the future development of such mHealth technologies to promote healthy eating routines among office workers.
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Office well-being aims to explore and support a healthy, balanced and active work style in office environments. Recent work on tangible user interfaces has started to explore the role of physical, tangible interfaces as active interventions to explore how to tackle problems such as inactive work and lifestyles, and increasingly sedentary behaviours. We identify a fragmented research landscape on tangible Office well-being interventions, missing the relationship between interventions, data, design strategies, and outcomes, and behaviour change techniques. Based on the analysis of 40 papers, we identify 7 classifications in tangible Office well-being interventions and analyse the intervention based on their role and foundation in behaviour change. Based on the analysis, we present design considerations for the development of future tangible Office well-being design interventions and present an overview of the current field and future research into tangible Office well-being interventions to design for a healthier and active office environment.
