An Ambient-Physical System to Infer Concentration in Open-plan Workplace
This addresses the challenge of optimizing open-plan layouts for worker concentration, benefiting designers, managers, and workers, but it appears incremental as it applies existing sensing methods to a new domain.
The researchers tackled the problem of inferring concentration levels in open-plan workplaces by deploying pervasive sensors to capture ambient and physical signals, with empirical testing in two large workplaces showing promising applications for enhancing workplace capabilities.
One of the core challenges in open-plan workspaces is to ensure a good level of concentration for the workers while performing their tasks. Hence, being able to infer concentration levels of workers will allow building designers, managers, and workers to estimate what effect different open-plan layouts will have and to find an optimal one. In this research, we present an ambient-physical system to investigate the concentration inference problem. Specifically, we deploy a series of pervasive sensors to capture various ambient and physical signals related to perceived concentration at work. The practicality of our system has been tested on two large open-plan workplaces with different designs and layouts. The empirical results highlight promising applications of pervasive sensing in occupational concentration inference, which can be adopted to enhance the capabilities of modern workplaces.