Exploring Smart Office Design with Multimodal and Multi-users Interaction for Workers’ Well-Being and Productivity

Emotion detection in offices is not well studied yet because workplace cultures typically do not usually invite workers to fully express their feelings. The challenge lies in designing a smart office environment that addresses privacy concerns while enhancing user adoption and experience through comfortable monitoring, reporting, and intervention services for emotional well-being. Our design investigation first focuses on designing physical wearables (multimodal sensors) for comfortably detecting a user’s sedentary behaviour and mild dehydration status, and virtual wearables (software/apps) for sensing one’s emotional status with keyboard usage behaviours. Second, it addresses possible multi-user co-working scenarios for accurately sensing each individual user, and third demonstrates how physical and emotional interventions can be integrated for bettering an individual’s wellbeing and productivity via a case study for feasibility evaluation. This paper contributes (1) a new systematic solution for physical and emotional statuses’ monitoring, analysis, and intervention, (2) novel research through design processes to reduce users’ privacy concerns, (3) new multimodal information fusion methods to improve the recognition accuracy of an individual’s physical and emotional statuses and (4) an integrated intervention to both physical behaviours and emotional statuses.