Physiolytics at the workplace: Affordances and constraints of wearables use from an employee's perspective

Abstract

Wearables paired with data analytics and machine learning algorithms that measure physiological (and other) parameters are slowly finding their way into our workplace. Several studies have reported positive effects from using such “physiolytics” devices and purported the notion that it may lead to significant workplace safety improvements or to increased awareness among employees concerning unhealthy work practices and other job‐related health and well‐being issues. At the same time, physiolytics may cause an overdependency on technology and create new constraints on privacy, individuality, and personal freedom. While it is easy to understand why organizations are implementing physiolytics, it remains unclear what employees think about using wearables at their workplace. Using an affordance theory lens, we, therefore, explore the mental models of employees who are faced with the introduction of physiolytics as part of corporate wellness or security programs. We identify five distinct user types each of which characterizes a specific viewpoint on physiolytics at the workplace: the freedom loving, the individualist, the cynical, the tech independent, and the balancer. Our findings allow for better understanding the wider implications and possible user responses to the introduction of wearable technologies in occupational settings and address the need for opening up the “user black box” in IS use research.

An application of goal content theory to examine how desired exercise outcomes impact fitness technology feature set selection

“…Exercise goals are just one way of categorizing users. Other physical, motivational, and psychological characteristics of users or exercisers may be explored that may add to the conversation (eg, Mettler & Wulf, ; Wankel, ). For example, exploring the impact of social physique anxiety (Brunet & Sabiston, ) could be an interesting direction for future research.…”

How affordances of chatbots cross the chasm between social and traditional enterprise systems

“…To further explore in more detail the mental models that employees have developed when using chatbots (i.e., integrations into conversational threads), we have chosen to apply a mixed-method approach called Q-methodology, as it offers a rigorous and systematic way for capturing human subjectivity (Mettler and Wulf 2018;Stephenson 1935Stephenson , 1986.…”

“…In particular, when exploring affordances which technological artifacts provide, it proved a useful tool to systematically analyze the subjective perception of these artifacts (cf. Mettler et al 2017;Mettler and Wulf 2018). Both of the latter studies draw on the affordance theory to study the attitudes towards adopting service robots (Mettler et al 2017) and to explore the mental models of employees who are faced with the introduction of physiolytics (Mettler and Wulf 2018).…”

“…At the core of Q-Methodology, the correlation matrix lies the foundation to apply factor analysis to determine a set of basically different Q-sorts that are evident in the data (Brown 1993). Note that the way factor analysis is applied is on a by-Q sort (i.e., byperson) level, which means that each record is transposed so that the statements are in rows and the sort values (i.e., from −2 to +2) are in columns (i.e., one column for each participant) (Mettler and Wulf 2018).…”

The art of vivacious variance

“…In the tenth paper, Mettler and Wulf (2018) address the increasing adoption of physiolytics in the workplace.…”