Mobile Monitoring of Formal and Informal Social Interactions at Workplace

This paper proposes using mobile technologies to provide an insight into social context at workplace. It provides takeaways for extracting features that are relevant for interpreting social context and types of social interactions, formal or informal. Our approach uses mobile phones and accelerometers to detect interpersonal spatial and speech related features, achieving accuracy of around 80% in classifying between formal and informal social interactions, based on the study of 53 social interactions. One of the potential impacts of this work is on studying communication channels to enable more efficient knowledge transfer between knowledge workers. There is an on-going debate in social sciences whether formal or informal social interactions foster productivity more. However, the consensus is that improving communication between workers requires deeper understanding of both formal and informal types of interactions.