Personal data collection in the workplace: ethical and technical challenges

Abstract

Forestry is a dangerous work environment and collecting data on site to identify and warn about hazardous situations is challenging. In this paper, we discuss our attempts at creating continuous data-collection methods that are ethical, sustainable and effective. We explore the difficulties in collecting personal and environmental data from workers and their work domain. We also draw attention to the specific challenges in designing for sensor-based, wearable rugged IoT solutions. We present a case-study, comprising of a number of experiments, which exemplifies the work we have been undertaking in this domain. The case study is based on our approach to developing a robust, trusted Internet of Things (IoT) solution for dangerous work environments (specifically the forestry environment). We focus the results of this casestudy on both the technical successes and challenges as well as the personal and ethical challenges that have been elicited.