An Ambient-Physical System to Infer Concentration in Open-plan Workplace

TL;DR

This paper introduces an ambient-physical sensing system that uses pervasive sensors to infer workers' concentration levels in open-plan workplaces, aiming to optimize workspace design and improve worker focus.

Contribution

It presents a novel ambient-physical system deploying sensors to monitor ambient and physical signals for concentration inference in real-world open-plan offices.

Findings

System successfully captures ambient and physical signals related to concentration.

Empirical tests on two workplaces demonstrate system's practical applicability.

Results suggest potential for enhancing workplace design and worker productivity.

Abstract

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.