Using Wearables to enhance Police Officers' Resilience
other
The use of wearable technology to monitor fitness and health has seen a rapid increase among consumers in recent years. Military and police organisations are interested to learn whether and how high-risk professionals can also benefit from this, to support their resilience and vitality. To gain insight in this, we performed an experiment for the Dutch police, investigating the effects of using wearable technology (with different degrees of support) on awareness and behaviour relating to stress and recovery. A total of 91 executive police officers took part in the study, which covered a period of 12 weeks. During the first 6 weeks, no personal monitoring technology was used. In the following 6 weeks, part of the teams used technology similar to a consumer wearables and another part of the teams used the same technology with added functionality and interventions aimed at personalization and integration in the team context. At the beginning, after 6 weeks and after 12 weeks, questionnaires were used to measure awareness, behavioural intentions, and actual behaviour relating to stress, sleep and physical activity. General well-being, subjective stress and sleeping problems were also measured. The first exploratory analyses after half of the data have been collected, show that the use of personal monitoring has a positive influence on awareness, behavioural intentions and actual behaviour, and even leads to less stress, less sleeping problems and increased well-being. At the conference, results based on all collected data will be presented and implications for application in high-risk organizations will be discussed.
TNO Identifier
1000298
Publisher
TNO
Source title
63rd International Military Testing Association (IMTA) Conference, the Next Gen, 9-13 October, Amersfoort, the Netherlands
Collation
16 p.