California’s agricultural workers are a vulnerable population due to their undocumented status and poor working conditions. This paper describes community engagement with NGO workers, farm laborers, and farm owners to identify and address the effects of climate change, namely heat stress, on, strawberry field workers. We deployed personal informatics devices in a longitudinal study with three field workers for a month and a half and presented the collected statistics back to them, asking them to reflect on their personal health (e.g., exposure to heat stress) and work data. We found that field workers normalized grit - the irregularity, adversity, competitiveness, and helplessness of their labor - thereby limiting the promise of personal informatics to help users lead healthier lives. Implicitly, personal informatics supports white collar workers such as information workers; overall, however, our study suggests a mismatch between current designs and front-line work which involve intensive physical work requirements.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713643
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