skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: Forecasting Health and Wellbeing for Shift Workers Using Job-Role Based Deep Neural Network
Shift workers who are essential contributors to our society, face high risks of poor health and wellbeing. To help with their problems, we collected and analyzed physiological and behavioral wearable sensor data from shift working nurses and doctors, as well as their behavioral questionnaire data and their self-reported daily health and wellbeing labels, including alertness, happiness, energy, health, and stress. We found the similarities and differences between the responses of nurses and doctors. According to the differences in self-reported health and wellbeing labels between nurses and doctors, and the correlations among their labels, we proposed a job-role based multitask and multilabel deep learning model, where we modeled physiological and behavioral data for nurses and doctors simultaneously to predict participants’ next day’s multidimensional self-reported health and wellbeing status. Our model showed significantly better performances than baseline models and previous state-of-the-art models in the evaluations of binary/3-class classification and regression prediction tasks. We also found features related to heart rate, sleep, and work shift contributed to shift workers’ health and wellbeing.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1840167
PAR ID:
10289954
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
International Conference on Wireless Mobile Communication and Healthcare MobiHealth 2020: Wireless Mobile Communication and Healthcare
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. We built and compared several machine learning models to predict future self-reported wellbeing labels (of mood, health, and stress) for next day and for up to 7 days in the future, using multi-modal data. The data are from surveys, wearables, mobile phones and weather information collected in a study from college students, each providing daily data for 30 or 90 days. We compared the performance of multiple models, including personalized multi-task models and deep learning models. The best personalized multi-task linear model showed mean absolute errors of 12.8, 11.9, and 13.7 on a continuous-100 pt scale for estimating next days mood, health, and stress value, while the best multi-task neural network model, applied to 3-way high/med/low classification of the wellbeing values showed F1 scores of 0.71, 0.74, and 0.66 on mood, health, and stress metrics, respectively. We found that features related to weather, and morning academic activities are strongly associated with wellbeing labels. We further found greater prediction accuracy among participants with the least fluctuations in their wellbeing labels. 
    more » « less
  2. null (Ed.)
    Background Shift work sleep disorders (SWSDs) are associated with the high turnover rates of nurses, and are considered a major medical safety issue. However, initial management can be hampered by insufficient awareness. In recent years, it has become possible to visualize, collect, and analyze the work-life balance of health care workers with irregular sleeping and working habits using wearable sensors that can continuously monitor biometric data under real-life settings. In addition, internet-based cognitive behavioral therapy for psychiatric disorders has been shown to be effective. Application of wearable sensors and machine learning may potentially enhance the beneficial effects of internet-based cognitive behavioral therapy. Objective In this study, we aim to develop and evaluate the effect of a new internet-based cognitive behavioral therapy for SWSD (iCBTS). This system includes current methods such as medical sleep advice, as well as machine learning well-being prediction to improve the sleep durations of shift workers and prevent declines in their well-being. Methods This study consists of two phases: (1) preliminary data collection and machine learning for well-being prediction; (2) intervention and evaluation of iCBTS for SWSD. Shift workers in the intensive care unit at Mie University Hospital will wear a wearable sensor that collects biometric data and answer daily questionnaires regarding their well-being. They will subsequently be provided with an iCBTS app for 4 weeks. Sleep and well-being measurements between baseline and the intervention period will be compared. Results Recruitment for phase 1 ended in October 2019. Recruitment for phase 2 has started in October 2020. Preliminary results are expected to be available by summer 2021. Conclusions iCBTS empowered with well-being prediction is expected to improve the sleep durations of shift workers, thereby enhancing their overall well-being. Findings of this study will reveal the potential of this system for improving sleep disorders among shift workers. Trial Registration UMIN Clinical Trials Registry UMIN000036122 (phase 1), UMIN000040547 (phase 2); https://tinyurl.com/dkfmmmje, https://upload.umin.ac.jp/cgi-open-bin/ctr_e/ctr_view.cgi?recptno=R000046284 International Registered Report Identifier (IRRID) DERR1-10.2196/24799 
    more » « less
  3. Puerto Rico was hit by a category 4 hurricane that severely damaged power, water, and communications systems on the 20th of September 2017. Based on 56 qualitative interviews, this article documents how health care workers created a new ethics of care after Hurricane Maria and engaged in novel forms of health activism to both repair past damage and imagine a different future. Many doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals went to work after the storm treating patients, fixing their workplaces, and resolving logistical problems. Health care workers responded emotionally to the event by finding meaning and purpose in their work, forging a sense of solidarity, and valuing their ability to help others. Our respondents used the term compromiso to describe their determination and sense of purpose, and we borrow this term to label the specific ethics of care generated from their experiences after Maria. 
    more » « less
  4. Little is known about what drives gender disparities in health care and related social insurance benefits. Using data and variation from the Texas workers’ compensation program, we study the impact of gender match between doctors and patients on medical evaluations and associated disability benefits. Compared to differences among their male patient counterparts, female patients randomly assigned a female doctor rather than a male doctor are 5.2 percent more likely to be evaluated as disabled and receive 8.6 percent more subsequent cash benefits on average. There is no analogous gender-match effect for male patients. Our estimates indicate that increasing the share of female patients evaluated by female doctors may substantially shrink gender gaps in medical evaluations and associated outcomes. (JEL H75, I11, I12, J14, J16, J28) 
    more » « less
  5. Physiological and behavioral data collected from wearable or mobile sensors have been used to estimate self-reported stress levels. Since stress annotation usually relies on self-reports during the study, a limited amount of labeled data can be an obstacle to developing accurate and generalized stress-predicting models. On the other hand, the sensors can continuously capture signals without annotations. This work investigates leveraging unlabeled wearable sensor data for stress detection in the wild. We propose a two-stage semi-supervised learning framework that leverages wearable sensor data to help with stress detection. The proposed structure consists of an auto-encoder pre-training method for learning information from unlabeled data and the consistency regularization approach to enhance the robustness of the model. Besides, we propose a novel active sampling method for selecting unlabeled samples to avoid introducing redundant information to the model. We validate these methods using two datasets with physiological signals and stress labels collected in the wild, as well as four human activity recognition (HAR) datasets to evaluate the generality of the proposed method. Our approach demonstrated competitive results for stress detection, improving stress classification performance by approximately 7% to 10% on the stress detection datasets compared to the baseline supervised learning models. Furthermore, the ablation study we conducted for the HAR tasks supported the effectiveness of our methods. Our approach showed comparable performance to state-of-the-art semi-supervised learning methods for both stress detection and HAR tasks. 
    more » « less