Rhythm: A Unified Measurement Platform for Human Organizations

Abstract

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 paper 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.

Speaker Identification for Business-Card-Type Sensors

“…For example, the literature [1] finds that in collaborative learning, learners using the same problemsolving methods tend to consistently produce higher learning outcomes. Some studies have used speaker information in multi-person activities to estimate human collaboration [2]- [5]. They found that the analysis of speaker information and speech timing can be used to extract detailed information regarding the collaboration, such as the most active group and the conversation patterns of the members who lead the activity.…”

“…Some studies have attempted to identify the speaker in multi-person activities using microphones, including methods such as speaker localization [6]- [19], speaker verification using voice features [20]- [29], speaker identification using voice features [20], [23], [30]- [47], and speaker recognition using a mobile device [2]- [5], [48], [49]. For example, speaker localization determines the location of the speakers from multiple sound sources using a microphone or microphone array.…”

“…One of the pioneer studies is Rhythm [5]. Rhythm uses a mobile device, that is, a business-card-type sensor with a 700 Hz sound pressure sensor.…”

Encouragement of Turn-Taking by Real-Time Feedback Impacts Creative Idea Generation in Dyads

“…In addition, several previous studies have addressed the effects of visual feedback on remote communication. Lederman et al reported that measuring conversation time and turn-taking behavior may be useful in remote communication [9], and Zolyomi et al indicated that showing the active speaker helps autistic people during video calls [10].…”

A Platform for AI-Enabled Real-Time Feedback to Promote Digital Collaboration

“…Our goal is to offer empirical evidence to support a positive association between increasing awareness of individual communication behaviors and team performance. To measure the impact of real time interventions, we used the Meeting Mediator, an online intervention tool that shows the conversational balance of participants [10].…”