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IPFS News Link • Surveillance

DHS Wants Wearables to Track Employee Health at Work and at Home

• https://www.nextgov.com, By Aaron Boyd

The Homeland Security Department wants to build a tech solution to monitor the health and stress levels of its employees to help identify when workers need assistance—due to physical or mental weariness—and optimize "human performance and resiliency" among the workforce.

The department issued a call for proposals looking for solutions that incorporate biometric technologies to monitor employees' health and "psychosocial information" entered into the software by the user. That data will be supported by algorithms that can alert employees to oncoming physical and mental health issues and suggest actions that can be taken to avert those breakdowns.

"The scope of this project is to find innovative technological solutions that will improve the overall health and wellness of those consistently placed in high-stress and dangerous conditions," the call states. "DHS is seeking capabilities that not only promote intervention action when necessary, but preemptively and in real-time optimize DHS personnel performance and resilience."

Those solutions should be able to address three goals:

Increase self-awareness of physical and mental status and associated limitations.

Promote actions or provide interventions that optimize human performance and resilience.

Define how DHS can measure well-being as a trackable metric over time.

The effort is targeted specifically at the Customs and Border Protection workforce, though officials are looking for solutions that can be used across the department.


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