'Smart' Office Cushions Track Workers by the Seat of Their Pants - The New York Times

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A Chinese technology company devised a way to track the health of employees, but sensors are still monitoring when employees leave their desks, sparking debates about privacy and surveillance.

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Hong Kong-A technology company in eastern China designed "smart" cushions and gifted them to their employees as office chairs as part of product research. These mats should be able to monitor their health, pay attention to poor posture to indicate possible fatigue, and measure heart rate and time spent at the workstation.

However, when the company's human resources manager started asking employees about their long vacations and early leaving get off work, they soon discovered that the cushion also recorded the last thing employees want the boss to know: when they are not at the desk, they may spell it Cause trouble for workers.

An episode of Health Boost IoT Technology Company raised questions about privacy and transparency in the workplace, and sparked an online debate about the scope of company surveillance. Although government surveillance is widespread in the country, residents are also worried that employers will conduct unnecessary surveillance.

The company, which is headquartered in Hangzhou, said in a statement that it had issued a warning to human resources managers asking it to "distribute" participant data "without permission." But the company's CEO Zhang Biyong defended the manager's right to review the whereabouts of employees.

He said in an interview on Monday: “If employees are not in their seats, then we cannot collect data.”

In the second half of last year, in a post she posted online on 19lou, a lifestyle forum, an employee anonymously revealed the existence of the special mat. The local news media reported the story this month. When the company manager asked her about the half-hour break she took away from the workplace, the woman recalled her alarm. She said that she had been cut in her annual bonus for threatening to reduce it.

"What does this mean?" She panicked. "This means that all the evidence is on the mat, and my boss knows it!" She added: "Going to work is like going to jail: the feeling of being constantly monitored. Who is actually in the office every second? Work effectively?"

The lady said that another colleague was asked why she left work ten minutes early every day. Other people have been asked similar questions. She did not immediately answer the question sent to her account on the forum. Although the employee did not disclose the company name, Health Boost issued a statement on December 23, denying that it was monitoring its employees from its office chair.

The company designed so-called "non-invasive" health devices, such as

("Sleep well" in Dutch), a device installed on a mattress to measure heart health. Mr. Zhang also co-authored related

Can monitor posture, heart rate and "

Technology for the "Future Smart Office".

In a telephone interview on Monday, he said that the controversial mat was designed to reduce fatigue in the workplace and prevent the pain caused by long working hours in the office. He said that the data collected from employees through the sensors on the mats is used to monitor employees' health and improve product technology, rather than to evaluate employees' performance. The data may prompt workers not to browse the measurement tables displayed on employee laptops and smartphone apps.

Mr. Zhang said that among the company's approximately 20 employees, 7 employees who used the mat have signed a consent form to participate in a research designed by a master's student from the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. A copy of the blank consent form reviewed by The Times shows that the name and identifiable information should be separated from the data to ensure confidentiality. It states that "some people can access all your data at the research site" to ensure that "the research is conducted in a good and reliable manner."

It is not clear whether all employees know that in addition to researchers, unidentified human resources managers will also have access to their information.

Chinese technology companies

"That is, the employee works six days a week from 9 am to 9 pm-or his close sibling 11116-works six days a week, from 11 am to 11 pm. However, young employees have been resisting low pay And inconvenient practices, they take long lunch breaks and often use "

, This is the idiom "seize the opportunity".

Mr. Zhang said that paying close attention to the health of employees is the responsibility of human resources. He said: "We now have a tool that can help the human resources department to maintain the health of workers."

Matthijs Hoekstra, who designed the Health Boost study, said that he has used buffer technology with the consent of the participants to study "vitality and health in the office."

Mr. Hoekstra wrote in an email on Monday: "We are cooperating on a technical level, and in order to improve the technology, we also voluntarily cooperate to collect sample data for scientific experiments in the laboratory."

His supervisor, Hu Jun, also said in an email that the Chinese name of the company is: "Outside Hebei, we cannot access the original data, and only the collated and anonymous information can be researched."

Researchers declined to comment on the level of access to employee data by Health Boost's human resources managers.

When asked whether he would reconsider the content of the study after a strong protest on the Internet, Mr. Zhang said that he did nothing wrong. "We have consulted many lawyers; we have the consent of the participants," he said.

Mr. Zhang did point out that smart cushions are better for employees than the company’s existing technologies (such as fingerprint clocks) used to track working hours.

He pointed out that the technology "doesn't even have health features."

Tiffany May is from Hong Kong, and Amy Chang Chien (Taipei) reports.