In today’s rapidly evolving healthcare landscape, frontline home health care workers stand as the unsung backbone of patient care, yet they remain largely invisible within the broader system. These workers—comprising personal care aides, home health aides, and certified nursing assistants—provide critical daily support to millions, often under harsh and exploitative conditions. A groundbreaking study from researchers at Cornell University reimagines the role of technology in this sector, proposing a shift from surveillance towards empowerment through data-driven advocacy.
Employers commonly deploy workplace tracking applications intended to monitor and regulate the activities of home healthcare workers. However, these tools typically augment surveillance, infringing on worker autonomy and trust. The Cornell research team sought to invert this paradigm by leveraging such technologies not to control workers but to amplify their experiences and build collective strength. By doing so, the study probes a novel approach to labor advocacy that integrates technology directly into workers’ narratives and daily realities.
The project, titled “Exploring Data-Driven Advocacy in Home Healthcare Work,” was notably honored with a Best Paper award at the prestigious 2025 Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’25) held in Yokohama, Japan. This interdisciplinary endeavor spans Cornell Tech, the Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, Weill Cornell Medicine, and the ILR School, reflecting the complexity of addressing home care challenges at the intersection of health, labor, and technology.
The United States, alongside aging societies in Japan and the United Kingdom, faces a critical care crisis fueled by demographic shifts. As family caregivers diminish due to economic and social pressures, more than three million home care workers are stepping in to fill the void. These workers endure physically taxing, emotionally draining responsibilities, often compensated at minimum wage levels and subjected to financial injustices such as wage theft. Their labor is indispensable but undervalued.
Responding to these realities, the Cornell team executed a multiphase qualitative field study focused on New York state’s home healthcare workforce and advocacy groups. Central to the research was the adaptation of WeClock, an open-source application originally built for union use. The app was tailored to gather comprehensive data—both qualitative and quantitative—about workers’ lived experiences, encompassing daily logs, time tracking, and geographic movements between client visits.
The innovative use of WeClock enabled workers to journal their routines, report unpaid labor, and submit timesheets with greater accuracy. Such granular data illuminated the “little stuff”—the nuanced, unpaid tasks that accumulate yet go unnoticed by employers and policymakers alike. By collecting and consolidating this information, workers and their advocates could expose wage discrepancies and scheduling inefficiencies that traditionally evade scrutiny.
Beyond raw data collection, the study underscores the transformative potential of turning data into collective power. Analyzing workers’ schedules and travel patterns provided organizers with indispensable insights for strategizing labor campaigns and policy reforms. The app’s data also buttressed advocates’ efforts to construct compelling, evidence-based cases for legislative change, strengthening the voice of a workforce often marginalized in healthcare debates.
Cornell researchers envision the WeClock model extending beyond home healthcare to other vulnerable sectors characterized by low wages and fragmented workplaces, such as transportation and hospitality. By highlighting the role of “data stewards”—advocates who manage and safeguard sensitive worker information—the study proposes mechanisms to alleviate the operational burden on individual employees while maximizing the impact of data for social justice.
Crucially, the research confronts the prevailing top-down imposition of workplace technologies, which frequently saddles workers with unremunerated responsibilities, including mastering unfamiliar platforms mandated by employers or regulators. This dynamic exacerbates existing inequalities, penalizing workers who must navigate technical complexity without adequate support. Instead, the study advocates for a paradigm in which technological solutions are designed collaboratively with workers, centering their needs, autonomy, and expertise.
Professor Nicola Dell, a co-author of the study and director of technology innovation for the Home Care Initiative at Cornell Tech, articulates this vision of technology as a tool for empowerment rather than control. By elevating workers’ stories through data, the research creates pathways for solidarity and systemic change, recognizing frontline care as indispensable labor demanding respect and rights commensurate with its social value.
The research’s methodological rigor combines qualitative ethnographic techniques with computational data analytics, positioning it at the leading edge of human-computer interaction scholarship. This mixed-methods approach captures the complexity of home healthcare work—mapping spatial-temporal patterns alongside personal narratives—thus providing both granular detail and a holistic understanding of workers’ realities.
Ultimately, the study’s innovative integration of technology and labor advocacy reframes how society views caregiving labor and the infrastructures supporting it. It challenges stakeholders—from policymakers to technologists—to rethink the ethical and practical dimensions of workplace monitoring, fostering a more just and equitable future for those who care for the most vulnerable populations.
As care crises intensify globally, research like this signals a critical shift: from surveillance as a mechanism of control toward technology as a means of solidarity and empowerment. It insists that workers, not merely managers or regulators, must be at the center of designing tools that measure and improve their work environment. Only then can the caregiving workforce begin to receive the compensation, dignity, and recognition it so urgently deserves.
Subject of Research: Home healthcare worker advocacy through data-driven technology
Article Title: Exploring Data-Driven Advocacy in Home Healthcare Work
Web References:
Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’25)
Article DOI
References:
Cornell University research team, “Exploring Data-Driven Advocacy in Home Healthcare Work,” CHI ’25, 2025.
Keywords: Health care, Home care, Health care policy
