Rhythm: A Unified Measurement Platform for Human Organizations

To understand and manage complex organizations, we must develop tools capable of measuring human social interaction accurately and uniformly. Current technologies that measure face-to-face communication do not measure interaction in a unified manner and often ignore remote interaction, an increasing...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE multimedia 2018-01, Vol.25 (1), p.26-38
Main Authors: Lederman, Oren, Mohan, Akshay, Calacci, Dan, Pentland, Alex Sandy
Format: Magazinearticle
Language:English
Subjects:
behavioral science
Behavioral sciences
co-location
computer-supported collaborative work
electronic badges
face-to-face interaction
Human factors
Mobile communication
Monitoring
nonverbal signals
organizational management
Organizations
Real-time systems
Rhythm
Social factors
Social interaction
social science
socially aware feedback
Streaming media
video analysis
wearable computing
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Summary:To understand and manage complex organizations, we must develop tools capable of measuring human social interaction accurately and uniformly. Current technologies that measure face-to-face communication do not measure interaction in a unified manner and often ignore remote interaction, an increasingly common communication modality. In this article we present Rhythm, a platform that combines wearable electronic badges and online applications to capture team-level and network-level interaction patterns in organizations. The platform measures conversation time, turn-taking behavior, and the physical proximity of both co-located and distributed members. Our goal is to empower organizations and researchers to measure formal and informal social interaction across teams, divisions, and locations. We describe two pilot studies that use this platform and discuss how measurement systems like Rhythm may further the fields of computational social science and organizational design.
ISSN:1070-986X
1941-0166
DOI:10.1109/MMUL.2018.112135958