Projects

Sociometric Badges Daniel Olguin Olguin, Benjamin Waber, Taemie Kim
A sociometric badge is a device whose main purpose is to automatically capture individual and collective patterns of behavior. We have manufactured three hundred sociometric badges and used them in real organizations to automatically measure individual and collective patterns of behavior, predict human behavior from unconscious social signals, identify social affinity among individuals working in the same team, and enhance social interactions by providing feedback to the users of our system
Dynamic Social Network Analysis Daniel Olguin Olguin, Benjamin Waber, Taemie Kim
We instrumented a group of 22 employees (distributed into four teams) working in the marketing division of a bank in Germany for a period of one month (20 working days). Each employee was instructed to wear a sociometric badge every day from the moment they arrived at work until they left their office. In total we collected 2,200 hours of data (100 hours per employee) and 880 reciprocal e-mails. The objective of the experiment was to use data collected using our wearable social sensors to correlate temporal changes in social interaction patterns (including amount of face-to-face interaction, conversational time, physical proximity to other people, and physical activity levels) with performance of individual actors and groups.
Measuring Productivity Benjamin Waber, Daniel Olguin Olguin, Taemie Kim
Sociometric badges were deployed for a period of one month (20 working days) at a Chicago-area data server configuration firm that consisted of 28 employees, with 23 participating in the study. In total, 1,900 hours of data were collected, with a median of 80 hours per employee. The task completion times and number of follow-ups were compared across four behavioral clusters determined by the variation in physical activity and speech activity captured by the sociometric badges.
Measuring Team Performance Benjamin Waber, Daniel Olguin Olguin, Taemie Kim
Each spring all first-year students in a Master of Public Policy program spend two weeks in an exhaustive study of a particular policy issue. Through readings and briefings by experts on the subject in question, each team of students develops and presents a professional analysis of the policy problem. A group of over 100 students participating in the 2007 exercise wore social sensors for a period of two weeks. In previous years, paper surveys were collected using the traditional snowball method. We expect that social sensors will allow us to identify behavioral patterns of high and low performing teams, as well as the team formation process.
Measuring Leadership Benjamin Waber, Taemie Kim
Students participating in a Leadership Forum held in Tokyo, Japan used sociometric badges during the duration of the forum. The Forum brought together 20 students from the US, mostly from universities in Greater Boston area, and 20 students from Japan, mostly from universities in Tokyo area, working in teams of 6 to 8 people. The Forum had three components: a leadership education session, thematic sessions on two contemporary issues, "energy and climate change" and "globalization and manufacturing" (lectures, discussions, and site visits), and an experiential group project that involved creative engineering.
Improving Patient Throughput in Hospitals Daniel Olguin Olguin, Miki Hayakawa (Hitachi Visiting Scientist). Collaboration with Peter Gloor (MIT Center for Collective Intelligence).

An experiment in a Boston hospital’s post anesthesia care unit is currently under way. 70 nurses are wearing sociometric badges every day (for a period of three weeks). The goal is to identify possible bottlenecks and inefficiencies in patient throughput. We have installed base stations in 30 beds and 10 phones located in this unit.

 

Recent Publications

Daniel Olguín Olguín, and Alex (Sandy) Pentland. Sociometric Badges: State of the Art and Future Applications. IEEE 11th International Symposium on Wearable Computing (Doctoral Colloquium Proceedings). Boston, MA. October, 2007.

Benjamin N. Waber, Daniel Olguín Olguín, Taemie Kim, Akshay Mohan, Koji Ara, and Alex (Sandy) Pentland. Organizational Engineering using Sociometric Badges. NetSci 2007: International Workshop and Conference on Network Science (Contributed Talk). Queens, NYC. May 20-25, 2007.

Koji Ara, Naoto Kanehira, Daniel Olguín Olguín, Benjamin Waber, Taemie Kim, Akshay Mohan, Peter Gloor, Robert Laubacher, Daniel Oster, Alex (Sandy) Pentland, and Kazuo Yano. Sensible Organizations: Changing our Business and Work Styles through Sensor Data. Journal of Information Processing. The Information Processing Society of Japan. Vol. 16. April, 2008.