Marc Van den Broeck

Tiny habits in the giant enterprise: understanding the dynamics of a quantified workplace

We offer a reflection on the technology usage for workplace quantification through an in the wild study. Using a prototype Quantified Workplace system equipped with passive and participatory sensing modalities, we collected and visualized different workplace metrics (noise, color, air quality, self reported mood, and self reported activity) in two European offices of a research organization for a period of 4 months. Next we surveyed 70 employees to understand their engagement experience with the system. We then conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 employees in which they explained which workplace metrics are useful and why, how they engage with the system and what privacy concerns they have. Our findings suggest that sense of inclusion acts as the initial incentive for engagement which gradually translates into a habitual routine. We found that incorporation of an anonymous participatory sensing aspect into the system could lead to sustained user engagement. Compared to past studies we observed a shift in the privacy concerns, due to the trust and transparency of our prototype system. We conclude by providing a set of design principles for building future Quantified Workplace systems.

Quantified Workplace: Opportunities and Challenges

We present the design of a Quantified Workplace system which has been deployed in two European offices of a research organization since October 2014. So far, the system has collected more than 680,000 samples of various environment metrics in the workplace (e.g., noise, air quality, . . . ) and 57,340 data points on the indoor location of employees. In addition, the system has received 7504 participatory inputs from the users about their moods and physical activities in the workplace. We present the system and its different services, discuss our initial findings on the user engagement, and highlight the challenges of device heterogeneity, privacy and trust. We conclude by discussing potential applications of workplace quantification that can be developed using the data we are collecting.

Understanding the impact of personal feedback on face-to-face interactions in the workplace

Face-to-face interactions have proven to accelerate team and larger organisation success. Many past research has explored the benefits of quantifying face-to-face interactions for informed workplace management, however to date, little attention has been paid to understand how the feedback on interaction behaviour is perceived at a personal scale. In this paper, we offer a reflection on the automated feedback of personal interactions in a workplace through a longitudinal study. We designed and developed a mobile system that captured, modelled, quantified and visualised face-to-face interactions of 47 employees for 4 months in an industrial research lab in Europe. Then we conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 employees to understand their perception and experience with the system. Our findings suggest that the short-term feedback on personal face-to-face interactions was not perceived as an effective external cue to promote self-reflection and that employees desire long-term feedback annotated with actionable attributes. Our findings provide a set of implications for the designers of future workplace technology and also opens up avenues for future HCI research on promoting self-reflection among employees.

Exploring the design space for geo-fenced connected devices and services at home

This paper offers a reflection on the design space for a geo-fenced connected device and service (GFS) - a specification enforcing that a connected device can only be used within a virtual perimeter. Many connected devices are nowadays being accessed through applications running on mobile devices instead of tangible controls. Whilst this ubiquitous access is highly convenient, it is also making connected devices more vulnerable. As such, we reintroduce location-constrained interaction, adapted to connected devices present in a modern home, and explore three design cardinals: (i) spatial granularity, (ii) roles and delegation, and (iii) access control. We report on a qualitative study that explored this design space through a prototype geo-fenced connected lighting system. Our findings suggest that users would like to have geo-fencing for a subset of connected devices, prefer to define geo-fences statically but with different granularities for different devices, and desire access control through location verification and credentials.

A case study on capturing and visualising face-to-face interactions in the workplace

Face-to-face interactions have proven to accelerate team and larger organisation success. Many past research has explored the benefits of quantifying face-to-face interactions for informed workplace management, with little attention being paid to how this information is perceived by the employees. In this paper, we offer a reflection on the automated feedback of personal interactions in a workplace through a longitudinal study of capturing, modelling and visualisation of face-to-face interactions of 47 employees for 4 months in an industrial research lab in Europe. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 employees to understand their perception and experience with the system. Our findings suggest that the short-term feedback on personal face-to-face interactions was not perceived as an effective external cue to promote self-reflection by most, and that employees desire long-term feedback annotated with actionable attributes.

PresenceScape: Virtual world mediated rich communication

The shift toward more horizontal and distributed organizations has presented communication challenges for individuals and institutions that are physically separated from one another. Video communication platforms such as Skype, Jabber, and the Cisco video communication system are widely deployed in enterprise environments to enable employee communication over a distance. Those video communication tools that are capable of audio-video exchange and document sharing are sufficient to establish and support communication for formal and scheduled meetings. However research indicates that a good deal of communication and interaction within the enterprise environment is not pre-scheduled. Although not supported by existing video communication tools, this informal communication and interaction plays an essential role in creating and maintaining collaborative relationships. This paper presents an innovative application called PresenceScape, which aims to support informal communication and interaction by leveraging a customized virtual world such as Second Life or OpenSimulator. The system is able to capture real life events, translate them into virtual representation based on user-defined rules, and visually represent those interpreted events in a virtual world. By providing an immersive and interactive common working environment with rich presence and context information, PresenceScape creates a “better than real” office working experience for remote users.

eSense: Earable Platform for Human Sensing

The era of wearables has arrived. As more and more established forms (e.g., a timepiece, a ring, a pendant) get a digital makeover, they are reshaping our everyday experiences with new, useful, exciting and sometimes entertaining services. However, to have a broader impact on our lives, the next generation wearables must expand their monitoring capabilities beyond the narrow set of exercise-related physical activities. To this end, we present eSense an aesthetically pleasing, and ergonomically comfortable in-ear high definition wireless stereo wearable (Figure 1(a)) instrumented with a microphone, a 6-axis inertial measurement unit and dual model Bluetooth and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) in an open architecture. These embodiments collectively enable eSense to offer three sensing modalities audio, motion, and proximity derived from microphone, accelerometer, gyroscope, and BLE, respectively. Most importantly, eSense is an entirely open platform that allows developers to gather real-time data streams of these different sensory modalities as well as offering them with several configuration and reprogramming capabilities.

eSense: Open Earable Platform for Human Sensing

We present eSense - an open and multi-sensory in-ear wearable platform for personal-scale behaviour analytics. eSense is a true wireless stereo (TWS) earbud and supports dual-mode Bluetooth and Bluetooth Low Energy. It is also augmented with a 6-axis in-ertial measurement unit and a microphone. We demonstrate the eSense platform, the data exploration tool with the open APIs for the real-time visualisation of multi-modal sensory data, and its manifestation in a 360° workplace well-being application.

Mindful interruptions: a lightweight system for managing interruptibility on wearables

We present the design, development, and evaluation of a personalised, privacy-aware and multi-modal wearable-only system to model interruptibility. Our system runs as a background service of a wearable OS and operates on two key techniques: i) online learning to recognise interruptible situation at a personal scale and ii) runtime inference of opportune moments for an interruption. The former is realised by a set of fast and efficient algorithms to automatically discover and learn interruptible situations as a function of meaningful places, and physical and conversational activities with active user engagement. The latter is substantiated with a multi-phased context sensing mechanics to identify moments which are then utilised to delivery notifications and interactive contents at the right moment. Early experimental evaluation of our system shows a sharp 46% increase in the response rate of notifications in wearable settings at the expense of negligible 6.3% resource cost.

Can Mobile Workforce Revolutionize Country-Scale Crowdsourcing?

Traditional urban-scale crowdsourcing approaches suffer from three caveats - lack of complete spatiotemporal coverage, lack of accurate information and lack of sustained engagement of crowd workers. We argue that mobile workforces roaming around the city (and the larger country) can overcome all three caveats if their daily activity routines embed crowdsourcing tasks. To this end, in this paper, we report a first-of-its-kind study in which we explore behavioral attributes of mobile postal workers both quantitatively (6.3K) and qualitatively (6) to assess the opportunities of leveraging them for country-scale crowdsourcing tasks. Based on our observations, we develop a crowdsourcing infrastructure with carefully designed data collection strategies, and a corresponding wearable data collection application. We briefly present this solution and discuss its potential in country-scale crowdsourcing applications.