A short review on physiological monitoring during working activities

Introduction: Temperature extremes, load carriage, inadequate sleep, information overload, dehydration, and impaired nutrition, are common risks associated with many occupational activities, including those for whom optimal functioning is critical at all times. These safety-sensitive occupations include firefighters, first responders, police officers, physicians, airline pilots, soldiers, and those operating heavy machinery. In any of these cases, the resulting interaction between occupational stress and individual susceptibility to illness demands careful management. This represents a dual challenge to organizations responsible for the well-being of personnel who engage in strenuous tasks, imposing requirements to be vigilant for or, even, curtail situations that result in high physiological strain. The emergence of wearable physiological monitoring technologies could prove advantageous in this regard. Purpose: To our knowledge, no review gathering the applicability of these systems within occupational groups has been conducted. Therefore, this review aims to summarize current progress in the development of wearable physiological monitoring systems for occupational applications. Methodology: Five databases were accessed (SCOPUS, PubMed, Science Direct, Academic Search Complete and Web of Science) and a total of 12 keywords were combined to develop a search on journal articles from January 2014 to January 2019. Study eligibility based on active workers participants and assessment methods not interfering with normal tasks development and involving harmless procedures. Furthermore, investigations conducted with prognostic health-related goals were filtered. Results and Discussion: Nineteen studies were analyzed in this review. In general, their goals were directed to quantifying the impact of specific physically demanding tasks or validating newly proposed methods for classifying the effects of different levels and workloads of occupational tasks based on workers’ physiology. Identified occupational groups mostly included construction workers, drivers, and firefighters. Retrieved papers highlighted the importance of field monitoring to provide a chance to timely detect any abnormal condition in the worker’s physiology that might be affected by working conditions or environmental stresses. Conclusions: Wearable sensors proved to be a valid tool for assessing physiological status in simulated and real working environments. Future research perspectives should be focused on validation of standardized procedures within bigger samples and involving a variety of safety-sensitive professions. Finally, based on physiology and novel computational techniques, it was observed that further developments should be concentrated in the algorithms that allow low-cost sensors to be used in operational settings to provide the continuous subjects’ status promoting to sustain their given tasks in a safer and healthier way.