Health IT, Payers, Startups

Humanscale collaborates with Premera Blue Cross in workplace wellness pilot for standing desks

The technology is designed to gather data on the amount of time employees sit and stand at flexible work stations, calculate how many calories they burn, and provide staff and employers with real time feedback on workstation activity.

quickstandlite_gallery1In response to the growing interest in workplace wellness, particularly through standing desks, office furniture maker Humanscale launched an activity tracking platform for its office furniture customers called OfficeIQ in collaboration with technology startup Tome last year. This year at the Consumer Electronics Show, it added an insurer as a pilot partner and made the technology available to other contract office furniture manufacturers.

The goal is to expand its customer base to companies that have already invested in standing desks.

The technology is designed to gather data on the amount of time employees sit and stand at flexible work stations, calculate how many calories they burn, and provide staff and employers with real time feedback on workstation activity.

Given the public health concerns of sitting for extended periods of time, standing desks have become a way to balance the need for people to do their work with the interest in lowering healthcare costs.

It added Premera Blue Cross, which has a presence in Washington state and Alaska, as a pilot partner, according to Chris Gibson, vice president of marketing for Humanscale. It will assess Office IQ’s health benefits and evaluate the cost savings. The idea is to quantify for employers the financial benefit of using the technology before they invest in it and how their employees will use it.

Last year it added an accessory called Quick Stand to convert regular desks into standing desks, and Gibson said it became its fastest growing category. This year it expanded on it with a counterbalance arm to make it easier to shift from sitting to standing positions.

Although it launched OfficeIQ last year at CES, it will only become available next month. It’s taken some time to get the kinks out of its sensor technology.

The sensors are designed to detect motion, weight, and proximity, among other things. For instance, they can detect the difference between a backpack on a chair and a person. But when people put their bag at their feet and would step away from their desk, the sensors would incorrectly interpret the bag as the person, so it refined the technology to improve its accuracy.

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