Unfortunately, anything related to a worker's actual speed will need to be a local warning system. It's much more reliable, and more feasible to implement. Some kind of API monitor that sends you an email when a worker drops too low would not be hard to implement, whereas offering it as a standard feature could add a lot of extra load to the pool given how many actual workers are running at any given time.
Actually, I have just started playing with Arduinos and I think it would be more fun to make an arduino watch for the green light and email me!!
Better than my original plan of flusing a toilet, right...

Use cgminer and my API

Write a little script to check it every 2 seconds for expected values.
The most useful one being 'devs' "Last Valid Work"
There are sample programs to access the API in Java, PHP, Python and C
Clicky:
API-README