ISELQUI TECHNOLOGY - progetto europeo SLID - progetto europeo SLID
Social and Labour Integration of the Disabled
REPORT OF STRESS CONDITION OF DISABLED WORKERS
The Pilot in Italy
On 25/02/2013, the Social Cooperative Opera (ex Zanzibar), in association with the ISELQUI partner, has started the MOCA ISE 6.4 experimentation.
Results in Italy
All people have enthusiastically welcomed the bracelet above all with the prospect to know the results on their status of health, although it had been their explained that the device was not provided any kind of medical exams.
Example:
Conclusions
The pilot done in Italy, even if with a few persons and for a week, can already indicate that the factors of anxiety, have multiplied in people with disabilities if they are put in work environments that increase stimuli with the external environment. Instead, while they are like at home if they are working in collaboration with other disabled people in order to share their responsibility.
Pilot in Croatia
The pilot was done in Split in particular in DES, an association offering employment to many disabled people in the Split area.
DES is a compound occupying 11.000 m2 and is organized in 7 working units /departments: Vocational training and rehabilitation centre, Carton manufacturing, Silk-screen printing, Printing and book-binding, Restaurant and catering, Clothing manufacturing, Management and Administration.
At the beginning the most part of disabled people confirmed the enthusiasm and interest to participate to the pilot. But for internal technical reasons for the SLID project it had to select a shirt number of persons. So there was been a selection in the DES, with the help of the other Croatian institution and, after a long process, only a group of 14 persons was chose as potential participant in the pilot.
Results in Croatia
Example:
Conclusions
The pilot done in Croatia with 10 participants shows more information than the pilot in Italy (with only 4 participants) and it shows a common item: people are relaxed during the break and during the last day of the week (thinking of Saturday and Sunday!!!). May be Friday, as the last day before the weekend past at home, diverts them and improves their mood.
People working in places such as warehouse, cartoon production, cleaning, are more stressed than others working in different departments (such as commercial office, dressing production). This is an interesting item underlined among participants of the target group in the Croatian pilots. Someone, even if he works less, are stressed by their physical disability: they are used to walk in the different departments without self control.
The pilot in Albania
With regards to the selection procedures for participants in the MOCA trial, ADRF has been sharing and consulting with DES and Iselqui, this communication was intensified in February and March 2013. As Des was implementing this experiment two weeks prior to ADRF, a lot of exchange of info with DES assisted to clarify any uncertainty that was still within ADRF and also the selected disabled people that agreed to participate.
The idea was to select participants from different disability categories/diagnoses, different group ages taking into consideration also gender issues. Out of initially 14 disabled individuals that were selected and had agreed to participate, only 11 finally participated (8 male and 3 female) belonging mainly to the category of blind and physically disabled people.
Information sessions were organized with participants and agreement and consent papers were signed with all of them prior to the conduct of MOCA.
MOCA was conducted in Albania the last week of March 2013. The expert that was involved by Iselqui worked closely with a local staff of ADRF who also assisted with interpreting from Italian into Albawrite my essay online i need an essay nownian and vice versa.
The trial period went all very well and every individual is looking forward to findings of this experiment. The trial in Tirana was in different job placements in the city area.
Results in Albaniawrite my essay online i need an essay now
Example:
Conclusions
The pilot in Albania has underlined how some types of works caused a lot of stress: two examples of these works are call centre receptionist and handiwork in the wheelchair factory. In particular these status of stress are longer in the receptionist working in a call centre.
It’s interesting to see that the same type of work of receptionist but that is not involved in continuously (like in World Vision) brings a higher status of physical and mental tranquillity. Like in Croatia, in Albania all the participants are less stressed at he end of the week.
However this aspect is less marked than in Croatia, where the mental disabilities are more that the physical disabilities if you compare the Croatian pilot and the Albanian pilot.
Final Results
An important factor in rehabilitation is the affectivity, lived in various job situations, that communicates to the people
new sensations allowing them a greater emotional involvement.
One of the components of the affectivity is the “aggression”: well a work can allow the person with mental disability to express its aggressiveness in a socially accepted way and so he will be able to learn a self-control of his aggressiveness.
The work allows the disabled person to gain a growing autonomy and offers numerous opportunities for socialization, intended as social integration in a broader environment, where there are the conditions for new and stimulating human contacts that allow the person to express themselves and compare even outside of his world.
However the work they are assigned and not chosen and it may be more deleterious than good in his rehabilitation,
especially if the contact with the outside world is much broader than you can bear: some examples are when the main
wish of them is to arrive at the end of the week or to plan extra coffee break without any control.
For people with physical disability you must reflect on physical frustration comes from a mechanical work or from a call centre where they have very few breaks compared to the receptionist or radio speaker or employer.
It’s more important to assess most appropriate tasks for each disabled people, possibly modifying some production segments or even creating a new specific task/function for the disabled.
The main conclusion of this study is that the differences among individuals with the same status of mood: in fact their physiological responses to stimuli during work are very substantial, and may vary significantly, for the same individual, in a short period of time (days).
That conclusion, obtained from a pilot survey on a relatively small and homogeneous sample, should apply to more numerous and heterogeneous populations giving the same result with high probability.
Whilst this puts into question the true effectiveness of any stress prevention strategy firmly based on averages of individual psycho-physiological parameters, this put in evidence the great importance of stress and the definitions of its thresholds, that are very difficult to use in a study with a rigorous methodology.
Among them, especially the correlation between environmental and personal variables, and, within the latter, the interactions between psychological factors (subjective) and physiological (objective), are more important.
In fact they are relevant to determine the quality of the responses to the stimuli with increasing intensity and duration
More conclusive solutions to these problems will come from an expansion of the data base available and then further refinement of analytical techniques, according to the approach here described.
Appendix A
GSR chart analisys
The “galvanic skin conductivity” data recorded using MOCA bracelets have been examined with a software that implements the algorithm illustrated in the document [1].
That algorithm consists of the following steps:
• consider an interval of 4 minutes in the captured data
• detect the startles in the interval
• calculate frequency (number of startles per minute in the interval considered)
• calculate the magnitude medium value of the startles in the interval
• compare the values calculated with the stress classification matrix
From these elements we can establish if there has been stress in the interval.
Extending this procedure to the entire capture we can draw the stress chart.
Following is an example of GSR, startles frequency and startles medium amplitude captured in about ten hours:
GSR diagram
Gsr value * 10 exp – 4 uSiemens
With these definitions and using the algorithm [1] we can calculate the startles frequency and the medium amplitude
values, then get a stress indication from the stress classification matrix.
Bibliography
[1] Wearable and Automotive systems for Affect Recognition from physiology
by
Jennifer A. Healey
Submitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science on May 18, 2000 in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy at the MASSACHUSSETS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY.