Mobile Productivity Sensing

Inevitable perhaps,  but is it Big Brother or will it be interpreted that way?

Can mobile sensing tools boost worker productivity?    in Retailwire by Tom Ryan with discussion

Using smartphones, fitness bracelets and a custom app, researchers have created a mobile sensing system that they claim distinguishes high performers and low performers in the workplace with 80 percent accuracy. The research was supported by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) within the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

In the new system, a smartphone tracks physical activity, location, phone usage and ambient light. A wearable fitness tracker monitors heart functions, sleep, stress and body measurements, like weight and calorie consumption. Location beacons placed in the home and office provide information on time at work and breaks from the desk. 

The information is processed by cloud-based machine learning algorithms trained to classify workers by performance level.

“Mobile sensing and machine learning might be the key to unlocking the best from every employee,” said Andrew Campbell, a professor of computer science at Dartmouth, in a statement.

The accuracy was tested by monitoring 750 supervisors and non-supervisors at a high-tech company and a management consulting firm over a one-year period. Continuous monitoring using the sensor technology was combined with traditional questionnaires to categorize performance. 

Passive sensors promise to offer a “more objective measure of performance assessment” of workers to the benefit of both employers and employees. Traditional review techniques that require manual effort can be burdensome, but also potentially biased and unreliable.   ... "