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.
"The United States and other countries like Japan and the United Kingdom are facing a care crisis," said Joy Ming, M.S. '23, a co-author and Ph.D. candidate in the field of information science at Cornell. "As the aging population grows, there's a shrinking pool of family caregivers. Over 3 million home care workers are filling that gap.
"However, they often face many challenges due to the physically and emotionally demanding nature of care work. They are also paid minimum wage, live below the poverty line and face high rates of wage theft."
The multiphase qualitative field study, which is part of the Initiative on Home Care Work in the ILR School's Center for Applied Research on Work, focused on workers and advocates in New York state. The team adapted the open-source WeClock app - initially designed for use by trade unions - to collect both qualitative and quantitative data on workers' experiences.
"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.
The WeClock app allowed workers to journal about their work, upload timesheets and track their movements between clients. This helped surface what one worker called the "little stuff that we do that we don't really get paid for."
The data collected helped workers identify wage discrepancies, gave organizers insight into worker schedules and travel patterns, and helped advocates build stronger cases for policy change, according to Ming.
The team hopes the updated WeClock app can help other low-wage, multisite workers in sectors such as transportation and hospitality. They also say advocates can act as "data stewards" to reduce the burden on workers while amplifying their voices. More broadly, Ming emphasized the importance of worker-led technological innovations.
"Existing technological solutions developed and mandated in a top-down manner by employers and regulators result in cases where workers are saddled with additional responsibilities, like learning how to handle the technology," Ming said. "Ultimately, workers pay the price by not being paid for all of the work that they are doing. We wanted to explore what it would look like for technology to be designed by and for the workers."
Grace Stanley is a staff writer-editor for Cornell Tech.
