What works for whom in occupational physiotherapy - decision support system for sustained employability.(NWO-fund)

Wat werkt voor wie in arbeidsfysiotherapie – ondersteuning bij advisering voor duurzame inzetbaarheid. (NWO-beurs)

With an aging workforce, the need increases to preserve health and wellbeing as employees work until retirement age. Enhancing sustainable employability (SE) of employees will be of benefit to the individual employees and society. However, with care as usual it proves hard to predict SE on the basis of questionnaires and biometry from a Workers Health Assessment (WHA). This PhD project’s objective is to improve advising by professionals (especially occupational physiotherapists) with regard to the SE of individual employees by

- the application of sensor technology (to measure resilience, a key term of health) to the WHA and

- the application and validation of machine-learning methods: a Decision Support System (on the basis of artificial intelligence) is developed further and evaluated.

The desired result is an efficient (shorter), effective (proven result) and reliable (reproducible) WHS with DSS-SE.

The outcome measures are measured after 2 years during usual care.

Interventions are only usual care and input for the machine learning system.

Workers health assessment (WHA) is performed at workers and an intervention to maintain or improve sustained employability can be advised. After 2 years the WHA is performed again and information about the intervention followed in between is questioned. The primary WHA data, the follow up WHA data and the intervention that was followed are input for the machine learning system that is developed.