By Grace Stanley
Employers often use workplace tracking apps to monitor frontline home health care workers, such as personal care aides, home health aides and certified nursing assistants. A team of Cornell researchers is exploring how these technologies can be used not to surveil workers, but to help them build solidarity and improve their working conditions.
The study, “Exploring Data-Driven Advocacy in Home Healthcare Work,” received a Best Paper award at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’25), which took place April 26-May 1 in Yokohama, Japan. The project included researchers at Cornell Tech, the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science (Cornell Bowers CIS), Weill Cornell Medicine and the ILR School.
“Home health care workers are a vital part of the U.S. health care system, yet their voices are too often overlooked. With this research, we aim to investigate ways to harness the power of data collected by these workers, not just to document their challenges, but to elevate their stories, build solidarity among workers, and advocate for improved working conditions and meaningful change,” said Nicola Dell, co-author of the paper and associate professor of information science at Cornell Tech.
Dell is also an associate professor with the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute and Cornell Bowers CIS, as well as the director of technology innovation for the Home Care Initiative.
Read more at the Cornell Chronicle.
Grace Stanley is a staff writer-editor for Cornell Tech.
