Smartworkplace: A privacy-based fog computing approach to boost energy efficiency and wellness in digital workplaces

The massive digitalization of modern society has transformed human lifestyles in several dimensions ranging from social interactions to healthcare and wellness, including transportation systems, jobs, machinery, or energy management. However, physical environments and people have not evolved at the same pace, leaving a challenging gap between the advances in technology and how society efficiently interact with it. One specific case is the workplaces where digital literacy is not widespread among all employees (e.g. blue or grey collars) and the advent of such digitalization is a reality. This work presents an architectural approach to improve energy efficiency and wellness at work (by suggesting new behaviours and dynamics) while maintaining user comfort and keeping user's privacy. More specifically, this approach-inspired by the Fog computing paradigm-features a hierarchical scheme based of privacy maintenance which (1) collects real-time data from the users at the workplace environment; (2) processes these data in either in the Fog or Cloud infrastructure depending on the data sensitiveness; and (3) provides feedback to the user along with a set of recommendations related to energy usage. As such, the user is included in the whole data-cycle which allows employees to decide what information can be monitored, where it can be computed and the appropriate ICT channels to receive the feedback.