Workplace health is of concern to management and employees alike. Managers are concerned about the impact of health and wellbeing on productivity, while employees are concerned about impacts on quality of life. In the past two decades, there has been growing concern about the impact of sedentary behaviour at work. Before any interventions can be made to encourage physical activity at work proactively, it is desirable to understand the baseline characteristics of office based physical activity at work. Consumer wearable technology has provided a new and convenient mechanism for using personal monitoring to achieve remote observation of lifestyle related health behaviours. This paper describes how this technology can potentially be used to characterize different levels of workplace physical activity.
Keywords: Physical activity; consumer wearable technology; health behaviour; personal monitoring; workplace health and safety.