Okay.

Howdy Howdy.

So everybody today we have doctor Mark Benden joining us.

The hour for health lecture series.

As you may know, Doctor Benton is a department head for the School of Public Health at Texas A&M University.

And he's also the director of Texas A&M center for Worker Health.

And also he is the chief technology officer for Human Digital.

His areas areas of expertise in terms of teaching and research include in ergonomics, human factors, occupational safety and health, transportation safety, safe patient handling, and surgical safety.

So it was one of you want to discuss your research projects, make sure that you share, your research and tell us for sure.

So anyway, please help me welcome that provider to the podium.

Thank you.

I appreciate that, doctor for that.

Very nice.

Well, I'm really jazzed about being here because, I, we were just talking earlier.

You know, it's so critical to get out of your little department.

Your a little, you know, college and go visit other colleges and campuses and places and talk to a different subset of people.

And of course, what you end up finding is you have all these commonalities, right?

Common things and research and interest.

We probably at least share another common thing.

I'm a Texas Aggie as well.

So class of 1989.

Was anybody born in 1989?

No one was alive.

One person.

One person was alive in 1989.

So, yeah.

I was, Texas A&M Corps Cadets member, the Army afterwards.

I met my wife at Texas A&M.

So she's also an Aggie.

We have three Aggie sons.

We have three Aggie daughter and loves.

I have eight grandchildren who don't quite know yet that they're going to be Texas Aggies, but we're we're doing the whole maroon cult thing on.

I'm making sure that's happening.

So we're working on it.

But anyway, so we are center for Worker Health and our focus is obvious from the name, I would think.

But we really do look at a broad spectrum of workers.

So anything from, the dirtiest jobs you've ever seen.

Mike Rose show, Dirty Job.

Yeah.

Okay, so imagine any of those jobs.

Our folks would be out trying to keep those workers doing those dirty jobs safe.

So construction workers, you know, on auto mechanic, maybe someone who's on an assembly line.

It could be someone who does, high tech work.

So they're making computer chips.

They're in a, you know, clean room situation.

It could be medical devices, which is where I started my career was in medical devices at Johnson and Johnson.

So there's lots of workers that we think of, and they do get a lot of attention, obviously, particularly those really gross, dirty jobs.

I call those the jobs where you have to wash your hands when you, you know, before you leave work, right before you go home.

We also work with office workers.

And I'm going to focus on that today, just for sake of time, because I want you guys catch you guys for the next four hours.

So I really want to keep it, you know, light.

Just stay on topic.

So they they're all good for four hours.

I think they're fine with it.

Okay.

All right, we'll go for hours and let's go.

Before we do that, I want to give you a little quiz.

Okay?

So if you've got a phone you can take notes on or piece of paper, even better.

Because I understand that really well.

Give you a couple quiz questions here, and then we'll talk about them.

First question, percentage of office workers compared to the manufacturing blue collar kind of jobs that I talked about.

Percentage of office workers today versus 1980.

So give me a couple of percentages.

1 in 1981.

And today.

Next question.

Anybody know what a DVT is.

Deep vein thrombosis.

So these are blood clots that can form in your legs most typically.

And unfortunately they can actually go and form a pulmonary embolism which can kill you.

That can be lethal.

So they're bad bad news.

Nobody wants them.

If you've ever been on an airplane and read the little thing in the back seat pocket, what you're all supposed to do.

By the way, there's a little section in there that says, hey, beware of DVT.

Watch out for them.

They're going to get you on this flight.

You need to get up and move around and change positions and don't sit still for a long time.

If you're shorter, don't let your legs hang off of the legs of the airplane seat.

So DVT, what percentage of DVT has come from airplane travel?

What percentage of DVT has come from airplane travel?

Next question.

Diabetes.

Everyone understands type one, type two diabetes, big health care issue.

Huge huge problem for us in the United States.

Honestly, we're not sure how we're going to pay for it.

In the 1960s, when I was a little boy, that's, hard to believe, but in 1962, I was a little boy.

One out of 4000 babies born in the United States.

We're going to go on and develop type two diabetes.

1 in 4000.

Okay.

What is the ratio today?

So 1 in 4000.

That was a lifetime expectancy.

It's called of developing type two diabetes.

Back when I was born in the 60s one out of 4000 babies born.

What is it today.

What is the ratio today?

1970s.

There were approximately 25% of the US adults who were overweight or obese on the BMI scale.

If you're familiar with the BMI scale, it's a sliding scale.

You know, you you typically hear numbers from, say, 20 to 40.

For adults, over 40 is morbidly obese.

But and that's a real health, issue.

Health great.

Great health risks.

But overweight is the first level after normal.

And then there's, obese, severely obese and morbidly obese.

So for again, people in the 1970s, it was about a quarter of the population who were overweight or obese.

One of those to most of the rest of the people were normal weight.

It was a small percentage that would have been, considered, you know, severely obese or morbidly obese.

What is the percentage of overweight and obese today?

That's the fourth quiz question.

What is the percentage of overweight and obese today in the United States?

And we won't do Texas because Texas is not winning on this.

We're losing.

We're not doing well on this one.

So we want to talk about that.

All right.

Let's go back to the first one.

So percentage of office workers, anybody 1980s.

Is that of all workers, all workers in the United States, adult, you know, aged 20 day, 60.

That kind of my guess was 40%.

Okay.

Hi.

Office workers less than a quarter back in the 80s.

Okay.

Today, 80 depends on which study you read.

You're a little high.

It goes anywhere from about 70% to 80%.

So depending on, you know, who's who's counting, right.

And what they're counting.

Now that's a Matt.

Would everyone agree?

I think that's probably statistically significant at 2.0 £0.05 level value.

Okay.

Yeah.

We run our stats on it later.

It's a big change right?

That's a big delta.

And remember now this has occurred my lifetime.

I've seen this change happen.

In fact, I was a blue collar machinist in high school.

Child labor, because my father owned a machine shop.

But, so I remember quite well this kind of data and live this kind of data.

What drove that change?

Why do we have that change in office workers computers?

I would say technology.

I think that's a great answer.

Right?

I think technology for sure.

There was a couple of other geo political things that happened.

One of them was called offshoring.

So anyone know what that is?

It's where the U.S. sent jobs, particularly blue collar jobs, to somebody else's country.

So you guys have heard of Nimby was that stands for not in my backyard.

Right.

So you got some dirty job that has dirty chemicals and bad stuff, right?

Well, what did the US do?

I said, well, look how clean we are environmentally right.

They just shift it somewhere else and they're making it.

And honestly, a lot of those places we shipped it to, they don't have anywhere near the regulations that the United States has to keep the environment or workers safe.

So and not our brightest moment, not our bright, shining moment there.

But anyway, those two things for sure contributed to that.

All right, deep vein thrombosis, DVT.

So, what percentage were coming from air travel today?

A percentage of hospitalizations related to DVT are coming from air travel.

And are you sick?

On Wednesday, by percent.

So this is a bonus question.

What percentage are coming from people sitting in office chairs for a long period of time?

40% 55% 55% okay, so pretty dramatic difference.

Have you guys ever walked into an office and sat down in an office chair and had somebody brief you with a little card and a warning, right.

Danger, danger warning.

No.

Maybe some that you will, because I'm sure the lawyers will get involved.

And as long as there's more lawyers and engineers, we're always going to have this, this issue, diabetes.

So 1960s, when I was a little boy, 1 in 4000 lifetime expectancy of developing type two diabetes.

What is it today?

One in the family, 1 in 3, 1 in 3.

Look around this room.

Right.

How many times can we count to three in this room?

I don't know, probably ten.

Nine to talk to type two, which you develop later in life.

Typically, although we're seeing 12 year olds develop type two diabetes.

When I was a young man, y'all's age, we had a different terminology for type two diabetes.

We called it adult onset diabetes.

We even call it type two.

We just we had this phraseology because no one young got it.

Only older people who became typically overweight or obese and sedentary got adult onset diabetes, one and three, by the way, for black and brown in the United States, 1 in 2 for those babies being born today, this is, you know, where health disparities discussions come in, right?

It's significant.

That is a lifetime burden for that individual.

It is a life expectancy shortener, just like obesity is.

It shortens your life expectancy.

It's a very significant health care costs for our country, for our economy.

And quite frankly, I don't think we know how we're going to pay for it.

I don't think we figured that out now.

Is ozempic the cure?

Everybody's like, well, we got it.

Was it a pic now?

Yeah, maybe.

I think it will help, but we're not anywhere near turning the corner on this yet.

Yeah.

So has type one no or no.

It's genetics and it's.

Yeah, it's it's about where it is.

In fact I wouldn't be surprised.

20 years from now as it becomes more common and more socially acceptable.

Remember, there's cultural taboos and mores around a lot of things that happen in medicine and health care.

Right?

So as we get in, let's just say 20 years, more likely to select certain attributes of our offspring, we will probably down select for type one diabetes.

Last one there, overweight and obese.

So I told you there was about a quarter of the population in the 1970s.

Population 1970s, that were overweight or obese.

What are we looking at today?

65.

Yeah, it's close to 70% in the United States.

And we're running right at 80%, even 84% in some Texas counties, like one county just south of here, Graves County is 82% overweight or obese.

So, this again creates tremendous issues.

Now, we would love to think that we're going to pivot now or pivot to office workers.

We would love to think that office workers, you know, don't fall prey to any of these things.

I just talked about.

Here's the bad news.

There at least is bad, maybe worse.

All these metrics that indicate these are health indicators, right?

We talk about cardiovascular disease.

We talk about disease of lifestyle, which means you kind of control it, like what kind of pizza you eat.

Oh, snap.

She takes a big bite.

There's there's no question that a lot of these things like we, we have control over, like we have dominion over, right.

They're not genetic.

Okay?

So we have to really understand that.

Let's talk a little bit about what we're trying to do today, because, you know, we want to get through the material, obviously.

I'm going to bring you a lot of material quickly.

We'll have to, you know, kind of go through it.

I have provided the 20 to 30 references from our research.

This is all research done here at Texas A&M, through our center and you will see, you know, some of the data provided.

And then you'll also have access if you want to go back and look at some of the studies and read a little more about it.

But we will understand about productivity boosts for office workers.

How do you measure productivity for an office worker?

They might know because if you do, I'll give you $1 million right now because no one knows.

You know, we haven't figured out.

You don't even know, right?

We're not even sure what that really is.

But we like to say it's better because nobody can prove us wrong.

That's good.

Good field of research.

You get into you.

By the way, that's a good lesson for you guys, right?

Good field.

Cognitive functioning.

We do have a way to measure that.

We use functional near-infrared spectra.

Copy.

We shoot light through the brain.

We look at the amount of oxygenated hemoglobin in certain parts of the prefrontal cortex.

And we decide how engaged you are, whether you're paying attention, whether your executive function is higher or lower.

So we can get some metrics around that.

BMI is pretty obvious, right?

Height and weight doesn't account for your biological sex, by the way.

Just height and weight.

Which, you know, people might like or dislike depending on which side of things are on, metabolism.

That's an easy one to measure as well.

We've got ways to do that.

Sedentary behavior typically is just the amount of time you spend sedentary, which is a measure of the amount of calories you're burning.

So right now most of you are young, healthy adults.

You're probably burning, I don't know, let's say one and a half calories per minute.

You're not burning a lot of calories here.

Okay, I may be burning a little more because I'm up, I'm ambulatory, I'm supporting my body weight with my large muscles, which requires energy, which burns calories.

So I'm probably burning a little bit more, but I'm probably not burning 2 or 3 like I would if I was walking right.

I would actually burn even more.

Job satisfaction.

This is another one of those fuzzy metrics, but we have to look at it because the thing is, for companies, a lot of this stuff is return on investment.

If your workers are healthy, they cost you less, right?

Because you typically pay for their health care.

So healthy workers more profit if your workers are more productive, if your workers are satisfied, how would that return profits to a company?

If you have satisfied workers?

Less turnover right.

So retention and of course recruitment.

So you can get more better right.

Folks attract talent.

Talent is good.

Talent wins.

Talent crushes okay.

You will crush competition.

Have a lot of talented people on your team.

And if you want to really crush the competition, keep them for a while, right?

If you can retain workers who are awesome over time, you can absolutely just destroy the competition because most companies struggle to get people and keep them.

So this is a paradox.

Adults naturally increase their BMI during their working career.

By the way, that's about 1 to 3 pounds depending on the human.

So if I have a 30 year working career from age 20 to 50, would be great to retire at 50, right?

If I go for those 30 years and I only gain 1 pound, I've gained how many pounds?

30 years?

Times 1 pound.

How many pounds?

All right, here we go.

Nobody.

No, I didn't see anybody googling that, by the way.

They totally did that in their head.

So they're good on their math.

How about if you gained 3 pounds a year on average, 90 pounds?

Okay, so if you anybody in this room gains 90 pounds, you will be for sure obese.

Possibly.

Some of you may be even morbidly obese because your height.

So big, big question.

Big challenge.

We do that as adults.

They have a need for sustained physical activity to minimize the trajectory of that increase.

Most of us are.

I don't weigh what I did when I was in the Corps cadets, by the way, so I was 165.

Now I'm 185.

Okay, so I've gained 20 pounds, a little less than a pound a year for the last 35 years.

But I still have an upward trajectory, right?

A positive slope.

Ironically, they unnaturally typically by employers are coerced to decrease their physical activity in the work environment via forced sedentary an ism.

So this is what the employer says.

Do you sit down, sit still, do the thing that you're getting paid for, right?

Design stuff.

Cool stuff, right?

That's what the worker's bosses are telling them.

And they're doing it to gain productivity, which results in reduced productivity and weight gain, which results in more reduced productivity.

And by the way, more weight gain.

So these are these are real challenges for us.

We have sort of this weird thing going on in our brain about what we're supposed to do and how we're supposed to do it.

So what my team has done over the last 20 years really is we've been out measuring, we look at estimates of exposures and we take samples.

We look at, direct and proxy measurements.

I'll explain that in a second.

We also monitor for in a laboratory often first we then go in situ, which for an office worker would be where.

In the office.

Thank you.

And then we love to be out there.

Real people, real time, continuously.

So these are longitudinal, right?

Prospective studies over time, seeing what's happening, tracking and trending what's happening.

There are retrospective studies, which means what looking on the past.

Yeah.

I go back and I grab some data from 2020.

And I look at it today and I'm like, oh man, back in 2020, people had this thing going on, right?

Yeah.

That's interesting.

But from a science standpoint, if you really want to win at science, you need to have things forward looking, you need to predict what's going to happen and then see if it does.

That's really the way that science kind of, you know, gets validated a lot now.

It's way more complicated and way more expensive with humans to do that.

But it is better a lot of us, because of money and time, default to retrospective studies.

We just kind of have to, right?

We don't have the luxury of doing that other type, but that is the better type.

If we can, we get feedback, both generic and custom from the workers and then ultimately and look, this is kind of why we exist as a center for worker health.

We intervene, we take it, we do an intervention.

Now, sometimes it's sort of passive the way we do an intervention, and sometimes it's very active the way that we do an intervention.

Architects do health design and they do it passively and actively as well.

So imagine a building that I walk into a big, beautiful glass building, not as much concrete.

So really beautiful architecture, whatever that is for you.

You walk in the front doors, big lobby, grand lobby, and right in front of you is the most glorious staircase that turns and spirals and goes up to the next level, right now, around the corner, in the back, in the alley.

It's a dark alley, by the way.

There's an elevator when you walk into the building.

What are you?

Probably more if you're ambulatory and healthy.

And what are you more likely to do?

Walk the stairs and look around as you're doing it right?

Like us.

Cool to get all the natural light.

Look away.

They did all right.

Beautiful.

Switch that around for elevators.

Soon as you walk in and you take your sunglasses off, you put your cell phone in your pocket because you pop in, walk in in.

Terrible, very dangerous.

By the way, you put your cell phone away and you look up for elevators.

You do not see a staircase anywhere.

And if you do, it's like creeper central, dark and like, I ain't going in that thing like people die and people never come out of there, right?

You know, so you see these great elevators?

What are you going to take to the second floor and just the elevator?

Okay.

Both of those architects did healthy design.

One didn't do it very well.

Right.

But they both did healthy design.

So we can influence the types of things that happen to people.

Sedentary office definitions.

Just so you guys, a few quick ones here, this helps you get grounded in what I'll talk about today.

But clearly classic seated, you know, workstations, sit stand or height adjustable workstations where you can sit or stand.

So you push a button desk comes up to a standing height.

You can work there and then stand biased.

Every one of you has a stand bias workstation in your home or apartment.

What is it?

The kitchen.

That is a stand biased workstation.

It is designed to influence you to be standing while you do the amazing culinary work that you do.

Like ramen noodles in the microwave.

It's amazing, right?

Look at the influence it has on you.

It's great.

Now, if someone comes over to your home and you're in the kitchen preparing a meal, where do they go to talk to you?

They're going to go to the kitchen, right?

And what are they going to do while they're talking to you?

They're going to stand or sit.

And that's almost always they're going to stand.

So can you come up for a second?

So we're here.

We're having a nice conversation.

And this dynamic is great.

You know love love what he's doing.

Still some great research by the way.

We're having a great chat now okay.

Now come stand here.

So, how's it going?

Yeah.

Okay.

Oh, yeah.

How's it going up there?

Right.

How is he speaking to me?

Down, down.

He's speaking them.

Thank you.

He's speaking down to me.

So if I design a space for him to be standing and me to be sitting, think about people in wheelchairs.

This is a this is a significant issue, right?

It is not comfortable is not pleasant.

By the way, no one prefers to be the one being spoken down to.

No one likes that.

And that does run along gender lines.

So ladies tend to like that even less.

They do not like particularly a man to stand over them and talk down to them.

It feels very like the power differential is very odd.

You go back 500 years and you look at the king or queen upon the throne, whereas the throne itself, it's up, it's elevated.

They are above the minions, right?

There's power in all of this.

There's psychology and all of this.

So we started studying this about 20 years ago, and we started looking at ways to get people to move.

We found a lot of creative solutions, but the best thing we found was to design the office for Stand Biased work.

We found that was the quickest, fastest way.

If we gave people a chair.

And a desk, even a desk that could come up to standing height.

Guess where they spent 95% of their time in the chair?

Even after we trained them and told them it was better for them to push the button and get up in the chair.

Okay, but if we made their desk kitchen height, standing height stand biased, we gave them a stool instead of a chair.

All of a sudden, the percentage of time they spent standing ambulate right.

Moving, which is really the secret sauce, is movement.

Okay, really went up dramatically.

Now, we also found that freestanding workstations, if you wanted them to spend a notable amount of time standing, you needed to add a foot rail, had to have a foot rail.

If you've ever been to a bar, and I know none of you students have, but I have.

So in a bar there's a thing called a bar rail.

What does that.

It's a big foot rest.

Why is it there?

It's for profit.

It's one of the most profitable things a bar can do is add a foot rail.

Because if there's a foot rail there, when I'm standing at the bar doing my 12 ounce curls right half of my body, especially the large muscle groups that support me standing upright so I don't just fall into a puddle.

Half of my muscles, large muscles, are relaxed.

I get a little tired, I switch.

Now all the bar needs to do is get enough 12 ounce curls in here, and it doesn't matter anymore because you don't feel anything right.

You're numb, but they need that profit center there to allow you to be comfortable.

So you, you know, if bars are figured out, I think we can take it to other people, right?

In the office environment, these are a few other solutions.

I do actually like the little gerbil wheel, because I think sometimes that's how I feel, like in an office environment.

But the cool thing about that one is you generate your own power, so you make your own electricity.

That kind of green, right, made from sustainable wood products.

And also, you know, for architects, I think you guys can be a little more creative on some of the solutions we've come up with.

But there are lots of different options out there.

Whether you want to sit, stand, move, ambulate, you know, walk on a treadmill, ride a bicycle, being a hamster wheel, whatever it is.

Big point is break it up, mix it up.

Change.

All right, let me get everybody just real quick.

Stand up for me where you're at.

If you can.

Careful.

You don't knock everything off.

I'll just kind of take a deep breath, let it out.

Right.

Okay.

Can anybody feel a little increase in your heart rate?

A little increase?

Your heart rate should have gone up.

When you stand up.

Your respirations actually will increase.

You get a little more blood flow.

What's happening to is there's some chemicals in your body that are being released to fight the bad fat that's in our bloodstream.

So lipoprotein lipase, you're now starting to release some of that when you were sitting sedentary, you were not.

So you can sit down if you want or you can stand if you want, I don't care.

Getting up and moving around is critical.

We're not sure if it's the being up or if it's the transition from sitting to standing, which is essentially like a squat, right?

Like you do in the gym.

We're not sure which one of those is the best for us, but it does seem like it's a really big thing.

What happens if we don't?

What's been happening the last 40 years with the advent of technology?

And by the way, an easy way to remember this is a lot of what we're talking about for office workers is technology induced inactivity.

Okay.

When I came in the workforce and someone said, hey, check the mail, I walked a quarter of a mile to the mailroom and I came back with a little basket that I carried back to the office and handed out stuff to people in the office.

Okay, I was the mail boy in the master's degree.

That was great, but guess what?

I was getting exercise, right?

I got a quarter mile down, quarter mile back.

I was carrying something right.

Working up a little sweat.

I did that every day.

I also went all over the plant.

I moved around a lot.

Things didn't come to me.

They didn't ping right on my computer screen or in my pocket on my cell phone.

I had to go find that.

I had to go get things.

I go talk to people, I go see people.

That's changed.

Everybody zoom in everybody's face time and everybody's got, you know, their emails and texts, everything.

I mean, we can almost just be those people in Wall-E. You'll ever see that movie Wall-E?

You remember that were the people that humans like, like, have their little things that drive around.

They're so big they can't walk.

It is killing us.

It is really, truly killing adults, especially in this country.

But really, all of the developed world, 73% increase risk of metabolic syndrome, increased risk of premature mortality by 49%.

The active workstations, 2 or 3 hour reduction of sedentary time for an eight hour workday is really significant.

Like that is.

So we have to be careful with, with, researchers because we're terrible about this.

But we'll tell you a story about a statistical significance.

Well, I did a big study, and it was statistically significant.

Oh, that must be good.

Then.

Maybe the question you got to ask then, is it clinically relevant?

Does that move the needle right?

Does that change the health outcome of that person this year, five years from now, 20 years from now, 30 years from now?

And by the way, this is hard stuff because America especially, we love a pill.

Give me a pill for that, doc.

Like I got this thing.

Give me a pill.

It will work by tomorrow, right?

That's what I'm looking for.

But what happens is this whole game that we're talking about is really it.

This is how boring it is.

It's about weight gain avoidance, weight gain avoidance.

It's so much cooler to watch one of these shows where somebody is, you know, really heavy and they go through this like workout plan or they take a drug and they lose, you know, 200 pounds.

It's like, oh, it's so cool, right?

There's like an emergency, like a siren.

There's now come to the rescue.

We've fixed the problem, but there's a lot of other people who never gain 200 pounds.

By the way, that is a lot healthier for you than losing 200 pounds later, right?

It's better to avoid the weight gain.

But in our country, we don't really like to have a conversation about weight gain avoidance, maintaining a healthy weight.

We like to talk about losing weight, the latest diet fad, the latest diet craze, the latest pill.

We got pills now, right?

Everybody's into that.

So if you look at pre ozempic right before the those two drugs came out, the success rate which the American Medical Association says successful weight loss is five years later you still you still have the weight off okay.

The success rate for diet and exercise is 5%.

So 5% of your friends who recently lost, you know, 10 pounds, 20 pounds, whatever they they did five years later, only 5% of them will still have that weight loss.

Still, the other 95% gained it back.

That's why we're called a nation of yo yo dieters.

Lose it.

Dang it, lose it, game it, lose a gain it.

By the way, that is also very unhealthy for you over a lifetime.

A couple things here on sedentary behavior.

So children and adolescents, we've done a lot of research on this.

We won't have time today, unfortunately, to go through that because I want to hit some of the other stuff on adults.

But suffice it to say, massive issues, lots of problems.

If you're wondering, particularly the guys in the room about the drop in male testosterone rates, 40% drop, a huge drop in sperm counts.

If you never do this because it's wrong to do never, never project beyond your data, right?

So you have a line of something happening.

It's going up or it's going down.

Don't don't predict out there in time because we just don't know what's going to happen.

Right.

But if you were to do it, this kind of stuff, particularly for the guys, we're not sure that men are going to be able to father babies the old fashioned way.

Like if that line continues, it's significant.

If you get a chance to read up on it, it's fascinating.

And that's another one that we're not totally sure why we know that that follows obesity and overweight.

We do.

We do already know that for sure, but we're not sure if the overall drop is other environmental things or like, what's the stuff in the plastics now?

You know, it's a bpas or whatever, you know, bad stuff, right?

We don't know.

There's a lot going on, unfortunately not in the right direction for us.

So we're trying to find technology based solutions.

There are ways to do it.

We can have different types of feedback.

We can have structured programing, social support.

We can get people to wear things.

That's been proven effective.

Here are some of the ones that are out there.

Clothing, lots of devices, tattoos, implants.

How many of you have a smartwatch on right now?

Perfect example.

So there you go.

Your watch will talk to you to tell you it's too loud to you.

You're not moving enough.

Right.

So all kinds of things that your sleep isn't great.

So fantastic technology.

So the smart software is out there.

We are using that in offices.

We're using it to collect data, but we're also using it to prompt, like your smartwatch, those very, very significant, opportunities for improvements there.

Other things you can do with it.

You can capture the biomechanics or the 3D motion capture, what's happening with a simple cell phone now, and free open source software that's online, which is amazing.

We used to have to have a half $1 million laboratory to do what you guys can do now with your smartphone.

Watching someone work, it's just incredible.

Productivity metrics, lots of stuff there.

We track and I'm going to show you some examples.

We track all kinds of metrics.

We track data for, productivity output computing.

I just did an interview yesterday about Hurricane Harvey in Texas.

Back in 2017.

We were doing a two year naturalistic study in the Harvey hit.

That's usually a disaster for, literally a disaster for your study.

But it obviously is a disaster for all the people.

The businesses were flooded out, the homes were flooded out, the schools were flat, was terrible.

Okay.

But we were tracking all of these objective computer metrics as these folks lived through this, you know, horror show.

And what we found was that after about 30 days, everybody was back up to the normal productivity, not what they had before the storm came.

And they weren't even back to their office.

They were all remote.

Some of them didn't even have their home to work in.

They were working in Starbucks, and yet everybody was getting their work done.

Now, later, when Covid hit, a lot of people referred to that study to ease fears about sending people home to work, because we had already shown that you could be just as productive.

So lots of great technological solutions, lots of equipment, lots of companies out there that work with architects and designers to help plan for some of this kind of stuff.

There's a ton of benefits of the software.

These are just a few.

I think there are also some cons, and I would tell you the two things you're going to run into if you try to do something like this in your workplace, are going to be the IT folks and the legal folks and both of them pretty much.

Is there any lawyers or IT people in here?

Okay, good.

Most of them wake up every day and their thing they repeat in the mirror as they're going to work is no, no, no.

Right.

Because that's pretty much where their job is, is everybody comes home, says, hey, I got this great idea, I want to do this thing.

And they're like, nope, nope, nope nope nope.

Too risky.

No no no.

All right.

So you kind of have to figure out how to work around some of that.

There's a reason why they say no.

It's a scary world and there's bad actors who do bad things, even shut companies down.

Right?

They get hacked or something or get ransomware or whatever.

So you have to be careful.

Smart phones.

Kind of an oxymoron.

I'm not so sure about the smart part anymore.

We're already seeing a big rebellion in the country in K-Through-12.

Have you all been reading about this?

Where they're pulling smartphones?

You can't have a phone anymore in school.

You see, in that bunch of school districts have done it.

Several here in Texas are doing it.

And it's basically, you know, you walk into school, you put your phone in a little cubby or locker or whatever, and you pick it up when you leave.

Hey, listen, I did it right.

I went to school every day for years and never had a phone.

They know what a phone, what they know.

There was just like a portable phone, of course, but did not have one.

Parents are the ones who are complaining the most about this.

The kids are like, oh whatever, okay, I get my phone at the end of school.

The parents are like, but I gotta get Ahold of Johnny, you know?

How am I going to talk to him every five minutes when he's trying to study?

One of the recent studies on this found that teenage girls in high school were getting 350 notifications per school day, on average.

Now, I don't know what I was notifications would be because I don't have Snapchat grammar or whatever, but if I did, I'd probably be getting some notifications and pings and things, but they're getting 350 a school day.

I don't know how you do AP chemistry in high school.

If you're getting, you know, 20, 30 notifications per hour.

And some of those notifications, by the way, are probably a little troubling, right, to some of those youth, some of them are not positive, messaging.

And then we wonder why teen suicide, self-harm, anxiety, depression are up 40 and 50%.

We've never seen a generational change in those metrics like we've seen in the current generation that's in school.

And by the way, your generation is higher as well.

Not as bad.

Maybe it's the exposure may the we don't know.

There's a lot of research to be done on this, but it is a significant thing.

So obviously I mentioned distracted addicting.

If you want to read up on this a little bit, I've provided some references.

We're seeing changes in the human brain as a result of smart phone use.

Lots of issues, lower ability to process numbers and math.

Right?

Like one times 30.

I guys struggled with that.

That's maybe it's smartphones.

I don't know.

We're seeing changes in the ability to, to navigate around, normal pleasure centers like food and sex.

We're seeing changes in, sleep big impact on sleep, by the way, if you've got a smartphone, do not sleep with it next to you by an alarm clock.

If you're because the first thing everybody else will need is an alarm clock.

No, you don't buy an alarm clock.

Put that thing somewhere else.

Put it in the kitchen or bathroom to charge overnight.

Don't don't have it right there by you.

Very distracting.

We're seeing trouble with, people navigating big, big changes.

They're, couple things on the sedentary physiology and exercise physiology.

So for 50 years or more, we've been doing really good exercise physiology.

So imagine there's a Olympic runner on a treadmill, and we're tracking their metabolism.

We're seeing how they're working.

We've been doing it for a long time.

We're getting better at it.

What we haven't been doing is sedentary physiology, which is actually harder to track and trend and follow because it's just not a lot going on right now.

Right.

Like, look at all of you guys right now.

If I put some kind of special, you know, high tech meter on all of you, could I really differentiate the amount of activity you're doing versus you versus, you know, I is I'd be splitting hairs.

It'd be like almost nothing.

Now, if I put all of you on a treadmill and ran you for an hour as fast as you could run, I probably see something different about the three of you.

I'm just guessing, right?

Yeah.

You totally win, right?

Totally crush it.

Yeah.

I mean, there would be some differences.

We could.

We could easily pick up on those differences.

So it's hard sometimes measuring things that there's very little delta, very little change.

That's kind of where we're at on this whole topic.

If you wonder about modern humans, this is like around 2020s.

We're spending, very little time moving less than 10% of our 24 hours.

Are we spending moving?

That has radically changed over the last thousand years.

Like a thousand years ago.

Humans pretty much sunup to sundown.

They were moving.

They may have been running from lions and tigers and bears, too, but, I mean, they were moving.

They were doing stuff to survive.

We don't have to do that much stuff anymore to survive or even thrive.

It can be very inactive.

What do we know about movement?

It's better for you.

It prompts better work.

We know that, if we if we send something electronic to somebody and use the technology to our advantage, it helps get them moving.

We get better productivity.

I mentioned the foot resting foot rail.

That's huge.

We have a couple more that I want to hit on, some data here, but, move more, sit less.

Easiest message from today, right?

That is, that is critical.

If you take a look at some of the research we've done, you'll see a real change in the people in the studies.

This was hundreds of workers.

This one was actually in Australia.

We went down there and did a study, which was great.

Recommend it.

Beautiful country.

But if you get a chance to to read up on a little bit more of this, you'll see some of the differences that this made for individuals.

And it changed what we call biomarkers.

It changed some of their their health indicators of how they're doing on a daily basis.

We also have done this with college students and K through 12.

We've looked at ADHD.

We saw that they were able to transition more.

They could reduce medications.

They had better behavior.

We've watched some real positives happen for ADHD students, and especially in K through 12 we haven't seen the negatives for the non ADHD students.

So in other words, you got a classroom of kids.

Five of the 20 have ADHD.

Sometimes it's ten of 20 these days, but five of 20 have ADHD.

They get a little benefit.

They get to dial in and pay attention and stay on focus.

Stay on task better.

The other children, it's kind of neutral, but they get the sedentary behavior benefits.

They get the physical body health benefits.

Maybe not a change in their cognition.

So the the old sit down, sit still, be quiet is definitely on its way out.

I hope, we call those activity permissive learning environments.

So here's some different types of, architectural influences that that people have come up with for ways to position and prop and lean and do whatever else is, is different than than just sitting all day.

If you go back and look at some of the those studies that I've attached here, you'll see some building space tips around how to get people to move more, exercise more, for instance, walking meetings.

We've talked about conference tables even being at standing height.

So you come into the conference room because most people come for a meeting, they walk in first thing, they flop down, right?

And then it's like, oh, and then it starts.

That coma starts to come over them.

Especially after pizza.

Right?

I can see some of your eyes.

Right.

And our blood sugar is affected and we start kind of getting drowsy.

What's happening is we're digesting our food, our blood chemistry is changing, and it's not changing in favor of moving.

So a postprandial glycemic excursion, a walk after lunch.

One of the best things you can do to perk yourself up and get your brain dialed back in again.

Just adjustable workstations.

You guys can design these in on your projects.

Lots of data that we've come up with.

This is an easy one.

You can see some real changes here.

So this is how much time people spent computing when they were sitting all day versus when they had a sit down station.

Granted, they're not standing all day.

They're just able to stand and move more.

They ambulate more, they produce more computer work.

Those numbers, if you look at like three compared to 3.7 for corporations, if you have a 100,000 office workers, right, and you can suddenly get 25% more productivity out of 100,000 office workers.

So you might want to guess what kind of money we're talking about.

If they're all making a hundred grand.

I mean, it's billions, right?

In that case, in that example.

So it is a really eye catching thing for these companies.

They really want to do this.

This was on clicks, mouse clicks.

Mouse clicks is another way to sort of track productivity and attention and how quickly you work and how you're able to work.

We've seen, mouse travel.

So when you move your cursor across a screen, you cross through certain number of pixels and you can do that faster, better, more often.

You know, some of these are pushing 50% changes and improvements.

28 and two is a simple mnemonic for all of you to remember.

20 minutes sitting, eight minutes standing, two minutes walking.

That's a half an hour.

So every half an hour throughout your day, wherever you're at, whatever you're doing, try not to go past 30 minutes without having a little bit of movement.

Change position, stand, walk.

That's really kind of the secret sauce.

Couple things on, where we teach employees.

If we don't have a good feedback mechanism for them, they will struggle.

Right now, you guys have been sitting in hard plastic chairs.

I have no idea how you've been able to do it this long.

Kudos to you.

You're conditioned.

You're trained.

Right.

We've trained you to do this as students.

Unfortunately, if I brought a five year old in here who's in, say, kindergarten, if I had them sit in that stool, like you guys would just be so distracted because there's no way they could sit still, sit down and be quiet.

That is the natural human condition is movement.

We are hardwired for it.

We beat it into you, right?

Submit.

We make you sit down, sit still and be quiet.

And by the time you guys are at your age, you kind of gotten used to it and you sort of think it's normal.

It's not normal.

It's not good for us.

A couple other things.

On seated postures, there are multiple seated postures.

There should also be multiple upright or standing postures.

You don't want to have just one.

So if you've noticed, while I've been up here, for instance, I've been moving around changing positions.

It keeps the blood flowing much better for me.

Future technology and sensing.

I think you're going to see more offices built in with this tech.

They'll have these things to detect and prompt and and follow and track.

I think you'll have it lots of places where you go and you'll have probably your personal digital human AI assistant nudging.

It's called give you a nudge.

Nobody likes to be told what to do.

Don't tell me what to do.

Right.

Nobody likes that.

But a little nudge, a gentle nudge from a friend or a trusted colleague.

Yeah, most of us would respond to that, and that's probably where I think these things are going to land over the next few years.

Lots of custom stuff there.

Yeah, we've talked about all that.

This shift to remote work has been interesting.

So one of the challenges of remote work is that they're no longer in front of us.

So if you guys were all my employees and you all worked in the same office as me, I would try.

I'd try my best to put eyes on you every day like I want to see you.

Hey, how's it going?

How's.

How's the kids?

Right.

How's your uncle?

That's sick in the house.

What?

I want to interact with you when you're at a remote office or you're in your home.

I have to really make an effort to set up some kind of a video chat or something with you and have that, so we sort of lose that.

It makes it harder for employers.

We're still seeing the remote office trend out there.

It's a real thing.

It's way more than it was before Covid.

But we are seeing a pullback from employers.

You guys have probably heard of some of the bigger companies, tech companies saying, hey, I want everybody back in the office five days a week.

You work here 40 hours a week.

If you don't, you don't work here.

And of course, some of these poor people, they moved away like three states because they were remote.

They didn't have to be in the office.

Right now.

They're being told they have to come back to the Bay area or wherever it is.

It's, it's creating some, some movement in the workforce.

So remote workers, are they more productive?

Well, let me ask you guys, if you're a remote worker working out of your home, let's fast forward ten years.

You guys have got a nice home, nice neighborhood.

Maybe you got some walking trails, things like that.

If you're a remote worker, are you getting more physical activity or are you doing less sedentary behavior than if you are in a traditional office?

I would say yes, because like, for example, if you, I prefer fresh foods, I'm probably going to spend more on that hour instead of heating it up, sitting down, talking to some excellent.

Good.

It's good logic.

Totally wrong.

Yeah.

Totally wrong.

All right.

That's what I thought, too.

And we we were shocked.

That was my hypothesis.

It got blown out of the water, but that happens with me a lot.

It wasn't that way.

Honestly.

The workers who were remote and the workers who were going in the office ended up having statistically the same.

No difference.

We found this with driving, too.

We told we said, hey, Austin actually was one of the first places in the country to do this over 20 years ago.

They said, hey, you guys in this area, we're going to have you drive into the office two days a week.

These other people, we're going to have them drive in these other two days.

We don't care what you're doing Fridays.

Right, but we're going to have you drive in.

We want the other two day stay home because it's too the traffic's too congested.

This is going to cut, right?

I mean, 50% of the road traffic's going to go down.

So then they started putting some meters on people's cars like, oh, let's go.

Because it was supposed to help pollution and traffic.

Right.

Less cars on the road, less pollution, less traffic.

They found that the people drove the exact same amount of miles or more like, well, what is going on?

Well, all of a sudden, you know, it's 9:00 on a Tuesday, I'll have to be in the office.

But I'm sitting at home and I'm like, oh, you know, I'd be cool, like run over and get like a coffee at Starbucks.

It.

Because when you're in the office, you would normally do that, right?

You would just sit at your desk, go over to the coffee pot five feet away, get him a cup of coffee.

So it really again, design.

How do we design things going forward?

All right.

Let me wrap up here because I know we're just about out of time.

That's that graphic for home versus office and for, sitting, standing lying.

If you'll notice, those two groups of charts are the same.

There's no difference.

This was some of that data from Harvey.

If you want to go back and look at that study, I attached it.

But essentially after the hurricane cleared out everybody, even though they weren't back in their traditional office, everybody was producing the same amount.

Last one here is air quality.

This was a big deal because we found that the Home Office worker had poor quality indoor air compared to the people working in the commercial spaces.

So three easy things.

As architects, you guys can remember this fresh air make up commercial buildings have that homes don't unless you open a door or window.

Filtration.

Commercial spaces tend to have better filtration of the air that is passed through and exchange rates.

Commercial buildings tend to turn the air over in this room more often than you do in your home, because it's expensive.

Nobody wants to pay for all that in their home, right?

Commercial spaces do it because they want to keep the air fresh, and they essentially have a customer.

You all right?

That's the last thing here is big data.

I think that's where we're headed with all this.

We need that, solitary window.

It is a expression that's about 2000 years old.

It basically means it can be solved with a walk.

Right?

You can figure out the problem.

You can also help your health, whatever it is, but it can be solved with the walk.

So I'll leave you guys with that because I know we're short on time.

Do we have time for Q&A or did I run over too much?

Well, I think it would be okay to take 1 or 2 questions from the studio.

Okay, a question.

Yes.

And I'll just, So my first question is we're seeing all these benefits for having, you know, more standing that role that you gave.

Do you think that maybe in the future there will be some type of regulation or policy, workplaces implement standing desk and at least give that option to their workers?

Yeah, that's a great question.

So it's interesting that the market has kind of spoken.

So you guys have probably heard of like government regulations, requirements, laws, standards.

But there's also what's called good practices.

So there's good accounting practices.

There's good manufacturing practices.

Right.

There's good medical practices evidence based.

Right.

Nobody's saying you have to do it this way.

But look at all the evidence.

When I came in the workplace, about 2% of the workstations had any type of height adjustability to today, 85% of all workstations sold into corporate settings are height adjustable.

So the market is kind of spoken.

We're not regulating what you do with that once you get it, but we have sort of, you know, through basically good practice, best practice, market competition, found that that is now the common thing.

So it has changed that way.

But I don't think we're going to see laws.

I don't think we'll see rules.

Not not right now.

Not the US.

Well there are laws in other countries on this.

By the way.

Scandinavian countries have them.

Canada has a weak one.

So there are some places that have done that.

So Australia.

Wonderful.

Well thank you so much.

Yes, that was a fantastic presentation.

Covering technological interventions to promote, workforce health.

And also I like that a lot of us had questions regarding remote working.

Yes versus no office working and how that would be our health.

So very informative.

Greatly awesome.

Yeah.

Sorry.

Good.