Skip to main content

Advertisement

SpringerLink
Log in

Identifying and facilitating social interaction with a wearable wireless sensor network

  • Original Article
  • Published:
Personal and Ubiquitous Computing Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

We have designed a highly versatile badge system to facilitate a variety of interaction at large professional or social events and serve as a platform for conducting research into human dynamics. The badges are equipped with a large LED display, wireless infrared and radio frequency networking, and a host of sensors to collect data that we have used to develop features and algorithms aimed at classifying and predicting individual and group behavior. This paper overviews our badge system, describes the interactions and capabilities that it enabled for the wearers, and presents data collected over several large deployments. This data is analyzed to track and socially classify the attendees, predict their interest in other people and demonstration installations, profile the restlessness of a crowd in an auditorium, and otherwise track the evolution and dynamics of the events at which the badges were run.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
Fig. 10
Fig. 11
Fig. 12
Fig. 13
Fig. 14
Fig. 15
Fig. 16
Fig. 17
Fig. 18

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Want R, Hopper A, Falcao V, Gibbons J (1992) The active badge location system. ACM Trans Inf Syst 10(1):91–102

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Borovoy R, McDonald M, Martin F, Resnick M (1996) Things that blink: computationally augmented nametags. IBM Syst J 35(3–4):488–495

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Borovoy R et al (1998) Meme tags and community mirrors: moving from conferences to collaboration. In: Proceedings of the ACM 1998 conference on computer supported cooperative work. ACM Press, New York, pp 159–168

  4. McCrone J (2000) You buzzing at me? New Scientist, no. 2221, January 15, pp 20–23

  5. http://www.imtc.gatech.edu/projects/technology/CharmBadge.html. Also see: http://www.charmed.com

  6. Lewis DE (2004) Breaking the ice 2.0. Boston Globe, vol 266, no. 138, November 15, pp C1, C14

  7. Cox D, Kindratenko V, Pointer D (2003) IntelliBadge: towards providing location-aware value-added services at academic conferences. In: Dey AK et al (eds) UbiComp 2003. Springer (LNCS), Berlin, pp 264–280

  8. Fund J (2003) In the fray: people spotters—European Gizmo tells who’s who. Wall St J, vol 241, no. 16, January 23, p D8

  9. Bradford Paley W, Han JY (2004) Trace encounters: a social networks visualization at Ars Electronica 2004. In: Stocker G, Schopf C (eds) Timeshift (Proceedings of Ars Electronica 2004). Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern-Ruit, pp 252–255

  10. Terry M, Mynatt ED, Ryall K, Leigh D (2002) Social net: using patterns of physical proximity over time to infer shared interests. In: Extended abstracts of the ACM conference on human factors in computing systems (CHI 2002). Proceedings of CHI 2002, Minneapolis, pp 817–817

  11. Eagle N, Pentland A (2005) Social serendipity: mobilizing social software. IEEE Pervasive Comput 4(2):28–34

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Yano K, Sato N, Wakisaka Y, Tsuji S, Ohkubo N, Hayakawa M, Moriwaki N (2008) Life thermoscope: integrated microelectronics for visualizing hidden life rhythm. In: Proceedings of the IEEE solid-state circuits conference, ISSCC 2008, San Francisco, 3–7 February, pp 136–137

  13. Laibowitz M, Paradiso JA (2004) The UbER-Badge, a versatile platform at the juncture between wearable and social computing. In: Fersha A, Hortner H, Kostis G (eds) Advances in pervasive computing. Oesterreichische Computer Gesellschaft, Wien, pp 363–368

    Google Scholar 

  14. Laibowitz M, Gips J, Aylward R, Pentland A, Paradiso JA (2006) A sensor network for social dynamics. Proceedings of the fifth international conference on information processing in sensor networks (IPSN 06), Nashville, pp 483–491, April 19–21

  15. Laibowitz M, Paradiso J (2004) Wearable wireless transceivers. Circuit Cellar 163:28–39

    Google Scholar 

  16. Ambady N, Rosenthal R (1992) Thin slices of expressive behavior as predictors of interpersonal consequences: a meta-analysis. Psychol Bull 111(2):256–274

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Madan A, Caneel R, Pentland A (2004) Towards socially intelligent wearable networks. In: Proceedings of the student colloquium, the 8th IEEE international symposium on wearable computers (ISWC 2004). Institute for Computer Systems and Networks, UMIT, Austria; Electronics Laboratory, ETH Zurich, pp 30–32, October 31–November 3

  18. Pentland A (2004) Social dynamics: signals and behavior. In: Triesch J, Jebara T (eds) Proceedings of the third international conference on developmental learning (ICDL’04). Salk Institute, San Diego. UCSD Institute for Neural Computation, pp 263–267

  19. Gips JP (2006) Social motion: mobile networking through sensing human behavior. M.S. thesis, MIT Media Laboratory

  20. Pentland A, Choudhury T, Eagle N, Singh P (2005) Human dynamics: computation for organizations. Pattern Recognit Lett 26:503–511

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Gwon Y, Jain R, Kawahara T (2004) Robust indoor location estimation of stationary and mobile users. In: Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM 2004, vol 2, Hong Kong, pp 1032–1043

  22. Ferenczi PM (2006) Super prototypes—what’s next for mobility—Motorola goes modular. Laptop, vol 24, no. 8, January, p 98

  23. Olguín Olguín D, Paradiso JA, Pentland A (2006) Wearable communicator badge: designing a new platform for revealing organizational dynamics. Proceedings of student colloquium proposals of the 10th international IEEE symposium on wearable computing (ISWC), Montreux, pp 4–6, October 11–14

  24. Malinowski M, Moskwa M, Feldmeier M, Laibowitz M, Paradiso JA (2007) CargoNet: a low-cost micropower sensor node exploiting quasi-passive wakeup for adaptive asychronous monitoring of exceptional events. In: Proceedings of the fifth ACM conference on embedded networked sensor systems (SenSys’07), Sydney, pp 145–159, November 6–9

  25. Olguín Olguín D, Waber B, Kim T, Mohan A, Ara K, Pentland A (2009) Sensible organizations: technology and methodology for automatically measuring organizational behavior. IEEE Trans Syst Man Cybern B Cybern 39(1):43–55

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Pentland A (2008) Honest signals: how they shape our world. MIT Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  27. Farrall D (2009) How social networks network best. Harvard Business Review, vol 87, issue 2, February, p 37

  28. Laibowitz M, Gong N-W, Paradiso JA (2009) Wearable sensing for dynamic management of dense ubiquitous media. In: Proceedings of 6th international workshop on wearable and implantable body sensor networks (BSN 09). IEEE CS Press, pp 3–8

  29. Laibowitz M (2009) Distributed narrative extraction using wearable and imaging sensor networks. Ph.D. thesis, MIT Media Laboratory

Download references

Acknowledgments

We thank many of our colleagues at the MIT Media Lab who participated in the UbER-Badge project, namely Mark Feldmeier for badge mechanics, Matt Malinowski helping with badge construction, Lisa Lieberson for logistics, Missy Corley and Michael Broxton for fabrication help, Wen Dong for help with audio analysis, Walter Bender for analyzing and disseminating bookmark data to event attendees, and Ron Caneel and Anmol Madan for their comments. We also thank our industrial partners, namely Highlands and Islands for the collaboration in Scotland and British Telecom and Ricoh for their partial sponsorship of the badge fabrication. We thank MEMSIC for donating the badge accelerometers. This project was supported by the Things That Think Consortium and the other sponsors of the MIT Media Lab.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. MIT Media Lab, Responsive Environments Group, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA

    Joseph A. Paradiso, Mathew Laibowitz & Ryan Aylward

  2. MIT Media Lab, Human Dynamics Group, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA

    Jonathan Gips & Alex Pentland

  3. MIT Media Lab, Ambient Intelligence Group, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA

    Sajid Sadi, David Merrill & Pattie Maes

Authors
  1. Joseph A. Paradiso
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Jonathan Gips
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Mathew Laibowitz
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Sajid Sadi
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. David Merrill
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  6. Ryan Aylward
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  7. Pattie Maes
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  8. Alex Pentland
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Joseph A. Paradiso.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Paradiso, J.A., Gips, J., Laibowitz, M. et al. Identifying and facilitating social interaction with a wearable wireless sensor network. Pers Ubiquit Comput 14, 137–152 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-009-0239-2

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-009-0239-2

Keywords

Search

Navigation