UNDERSTAND YOUR HEART:
Employers have a legal obligation to protect you and your colleagues from hazards and accidents at work. Since 2013 the German Occupational Safety and Health Act requires that Occupational Health Management (BGM) keep an eye on individual work-related mental stress of employees. No wonder, given that in 2019, 19 percent of sick leave in Germany was due to psychosomatic illnesses. (TK Health Report 2020, preliminary publication of 31.01.2020)
Mental stress has so far been difficult to measure
Your company’s health management team endeavors to protect you and your colleagues from the greatest physical hazards in the workplace by enforcing of mechanical and technical protective measures or regular training and instruction. However, protection from the psychological stress of your workplace is still often neglected today, despite legal regulations specified in § 5 III No. 6 of the German Occupational Safety and Health Act.
This is by no means due to a lack of interest on the part of your employer, but rather because “stress”, or “psychological strain”, as defined in § 5 of the Occupational Safety and Health Act – has so far been very difficult to quantify objectively and on an individual scale. Stress assessments via questionnaires, the most common way of measuring stress, are prone to errors and bias.
The ambiotex smart shirt with its non-invasive HRV recordings measures the stress-relevant data objectively and individually. The data collected in this way provides a real-time view of the status of your autonomic nervous system.
Thus the ambiotex smart shirt opens a completely new chapter in corporate health management!
With ambiotex, it has never been easier, cheaper and above all more objective to comply with the requirements of § 5 and § 6 of the Occupational Health and Safety Act, i.e. to record and document the exposure at the workplace.
Would you like to know why the correct HRV measurement by ambiotex beats any questionnaire when it comes to measuring mental stress objectively and in real time?
You will find valuable insights below.
ambiotex determines the status of the autonomic nervous system in real-time.
QUESTIONNAIRES ARE PRONE TO BIASES
BUT YOUR HEART WILL ALWAYS TELLS THE TRUTH.
Today, most companies use questionnaires to assess the stress level of their employees in order to meet the legal requirements. The problem: questionnaires are prone to errors in several respects.
• Are the right questions asked correctly?
• Are the questions actually answered correctly?
It has be scientifically proven that when answering questionnaires, the average person tends to unconsciously overemphasize negative experiences and downplay negative characteristics to present themselves in a better light.* Often, people answer questions with what they assume is the desired or acceptable response. This quickly creates a distorted picture of the real, psychological stress of a person, a team or an entire organisation. The result: wrong conclusions for organisational development and company health management.
ambiotex provides clear conditions
The well-calibrated ECG sensors in the ambiotex smart shirt combined with the artificial intelligence of the ambiotex TechUnit continuoulsy records the heart rate variability (HRV) of the user and thus allow you to monitor the their autonomic nervous system. The data is compared to data from real people of the same age and gender, based on a comprehensive database of more than 15,000 people, provided by NEUROCOR.
Just breathe
By the way: Collecting HRV data via the ambiotex smart shirt also better ensures the privacy of the user than a questionnaire with self-reported information. The ambiotex smart shirt measures stress-relevant data objectively and individually, without the user having to do more than breathing.
This ultimately leads to more objective – and therefore more reliable – results, free from bias. This is the only way to obtain an objective, scientifically sound and unambiguous picture of actual psychological stress at the workplace that meets the requirements of § 5 III No. 6 of the Occupational Safety and Health Act. For the individual, a team or a whole company.
Source: Razavi, Tiffani (2001) Self-report measures: an overview of concerns and limitations of questionnaire use in occupational stress research (Discussion Papers in Accounting and Management Science, 01-175) Southampton, UK. University of Southampton 23pp.