65 What to wear? Occupational hygiene applications for wearables

Abstract Evaluation of exposure in occupational hygiene usually means monitoring the environment in which workers work and then comparing those measurements to established exposure limits. This one size-fits-all approach is protective of the majority of a healthy working population but does not account for variability in how individual workers react or metabolize certain hazards. Wearable technologies continue to evolve and proliferate, particularly in the workplace, being used to monitor a broad range of employee performance and health metrics in equally diverse use case environments. These technologies afford continuous monitoring of individual-specific data-driven outcomes, enabling more targeted risk mitigations and interventions to be developed, implemented, and evaluated. Wearable devices that can detect, measure, and compare a user’s heart rate, sweat output and composition, fatigue, sleep quality, etc., for example, would allow occupational hygienists to monitor and remedy, where possible, individual effects of exposure, both acutely and longitudinally, in a way that hanging an environmental monitor on a worker, simply cannot. Moreover, these data can be aggregated and visualized at the employer-level, such that targeted strategies for enhancing employee performance and health can be developed, evaluated, and refined as needed. Additionally, they provide a means through which complementary employee-specific insights and guidance can be provided to enhance compliance. This round table session will discuss the potential for wearables integration for occupational exposure evaluations, overarching research, testing, and evaluation approaches to inform optimal fit-for-purpose solutions, and thus the utility, challenges, and opportunities for using targeted wearables for occupational exposure purposes moving forward.