CONNECT
Issue 16
Data The personal data of each employee stays their own. Always. Nobody has access to it but themselves. Aggregated data of the employees is accessible to the manager and can help to identify where people may need extra support in the form of equipment, assessments, and initiatives to take more breaks. Brightday is an advocate for the employees and their well-being, not as oversight by the company. Now we can utilize the technology we use every day in virtual meetings, our computer and its camera, to benefit our own health and well-being.
Set posture The user interface is just a little circle on the screen. When the employees set their posture it disappears, so the user has the screen completely to themselves. It only pops up once the user gets accidentally stuck in a different position. The half-transparent interface comes up and shows the intended position versus the actual position. This enables the employee to resume their good position by simply moving the dot for the actual position back into a landing area. It’s really intuitive and easy. They also alert the user to take breaks and move more in front of their computer and not stay ‘frozen’ in one position. This follows the mantra“your best posture is your next posture.” The software even congratulates you when you return from a break or you had a very active and good posture streak. Still not enough Just when all the tracking of the position of the user and nudging them back into their intended position began to really work, people started to ask how they would know if they’re in a good position to start with. At that point, we searched for the best way to provide a minimum set of instructions to the employees so they could set themselves up for success. We knew they couldn’t provide an in-depth learning program like Cardinus because in the app it had to be bite-sized and fit the need of a specific situation in that fleeting moment. We got lucky and found Jean Couch who used to be one of the early yoga teachers in the US and had pivoted to teaching posture in Silicon Valley over the last few decades. She based her approach on a combination of traditional, ergonomic best practices and observations of populations around the world that sit and stand in comfort into old age without any special chairs, beds, or desks. We loved her approach to searching for good posture examples instead of treating the results of bad posture. She was open to adapting her teachings to reach a maximum number of people as long as we focused on the foundation of any posture and her teachings of the pelvis, and the basics of the upper body.
It will help everybody to shape awareness of their behavior and tendencies so they can counter the bad habits beyond the workplace as the consciousness around their movement, postural, and break behavior grows. It brings the world of Wellness, Health & Safety together.
But loving her and her approach was not enough. We went out of our way to vet her instructions in two ways before making it available as part of the software. Firstly, we created intricate short videos that encapsulate her teachings in short, soundless videos. We ran them by a variety of ergonomic specialists to find common ground and buy-in from the community that’s also the gatekeeper at corporations. Secondly, we verified the approach by slipping into an EMG suit that measures the muscle tension in the whole body to test where tension and potential future discomfort occurs. The aim was to prove Jean Couch’s assumptions were correct, and to help the animator that created the overlays for the short videos, to place the red tension indicators correctly.
Prevention+Regulation+ Assessment+Learning.
It’s the perfect leave behind after an ergonomic assessment but also a great preventive tool. It can be deployed with the click of a button to the whole workforce to help manage MSK issues in the workplace, especially when combined with initiatives like posture and movement month, where a focus is put on being aware of your desk behavior.
Special setups Of course, there are a variety of special set-up situations in the office and outside of the office. People often use a monitor and laptop to the side. The team had to solve some interesting math, reprojection, and scaling problems to make Brightday work when the computer camera is placed on either side of the monitor. Brightday automatically detects the presence of multiple monitors and adjusts the alert parameters accordingly.
Jens-Peter- Jungclassen is a creative problem solver, a true out-of-the-box thinker, who loves synthesizing complex systems into clean designs. Originally from Germany, Jens- Peter has Masters’Degrees in Biology, Physical Education, and Higher Education from Christian Albrecht Universität in Kiel. He moved to San Francisco in 2002, where he focuses on UX and UI Design. Jens-Peter has founded and consulted for multiple experiential and educational companies, government agencies. He co-founded Brightday in 2016 with Richard Gray.
And last but not least, we added a series of stretch and exercise videos. These can be scheduled in the work calendar to prompt mini-workouts at a chosen time during the week to keep your workforce active, energized, healthy, and well. Talking to HR wellness and EHS managers We see Brightday as a preventative measure that can be easily deployed to every employee in an organization that works at a computer, be it a worker in a call center or the CEO.
Now we can utilize the technology we use every day in virtual meetings, our computer and its camera, to benefit
our own health and well-being.
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