One of the newest standards in the ISO 27k series is ISO 27701, which addresses security techniques for privacy information management. ISO 27701 offers a certification opportunity that cannot be missed for organisations that already align with ISO 27001 and have completed a GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) compliance project.
Mad@Work: privacy-aware wellbeing solutions for the workplace
May 5, 2020 at 13:05
Mad@Work is a study project that focuses on the detection and mitigation of employees' poor mental health conditions. The goal of the project is to develop new human resource management solutions to improve workplace conditions and employee wellbeing. Nixu is one of the companies participating in the project and focuses on privacy-by-design software development and personal data control with MyData principles.
What is Mad@Work?
Mad@Work is the short name for the project ITEA3 Mental Wellbeing Management and Productivity Boosting in the Workplace. It's a VTT study project that focuses on the detection of mitigation of employees' poor mental health conditions, such as work-related stress and burnout, to prevent associated health risks. The goal of the project is to develop new human resource management solutions to improve workplace conditions, employee wellbeing, and performance. The solutions will combine data from a range of environmental sensors and wearable data sources in a privacy-safe and unobtrusive way.
Nixu is one of the many companies participating in the project and focuses on privacy-by-design software development and personal data control with MyData principles.
The background of the project lies in many studies showing that work stress is associated with increased risk of depressive symptoms and that lost working days have some links with work stress. According to the World Health Organization, depression and anxiety disorders cost the global economy $1 trillion per year in lost productivity. The current research into assessing mental conditions is mainly done in labs, and the results cannot be used directly in real life. Many of the existing solutions also deal with stress only on an individual level, but they don't deal with the actual sources of stress.
The duration of the study is nearly three years, ending in September 2022. During the project, the developed IoT products and other solutions will be tested in long-term pilots.
Privacy-safe software and devices
Privacy problems will undoubtedly arise when building a solution that measures and analyses people at work. Imaginative data collection methods, potentially conflicting legal requirements, and various stakeholders with different interests to the employees' personal data complicate the picture further. Nixu's goal is to develop a model to uncover and assess the privacy and ethical impacts of ubiquitous computing at the individual level and in the employee-employer relationship. Nixu aims at making privacy-aware software design easier by developing reusable privacy patterns that concentrate on commonly occurring privacy design issues and describe the solution to each. Nixu will also set up a standardized MyData platform to enable users to control the usage and sharing of their data fully. Overall, Nixu is on a mission to create practical ways of embedding privacy to the business model and mitigating possible trade-offs between the business aim and ethical, privacy-safe personal data processing.
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