IEEE Spectrum December, 2012 - 36

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term level of happiness. Likewise, many people suppose that keep a diary of their feelings and corresponding activities
a relationship setback, professional failure, or financial crisis throughout the day. Their HBM data-particularly the rhythm
will make them much more unhappy than it actually does. It of their movements as measured by the accelerometers-were
turns out that most people adapt to both positive and negative then compared with their diaries. There was no one movement
or one type of activity that corresponded to a state of flow, nor
circumstances much faster than they expect.
What does make a difference in happiness are people's habits was there a particular time of day during which workers were
and activities. Even simple actions like expressing gratitude better able to focus intensely in this way. And that makes sense,
and performing acts of kindness can make you feel measurably given people's individual styles and quirks.
The key indicator of flow turned out to be consistency in
better. The conclusion? Changing activities, rather than fixating on ideal circumstances, is the best way to boost happiness. movement. For some people, that consistent movement was
slow; for others it was fast. Some were morning
The benefits of happiness go beyond just feelpeople; others favored the afternoon or evenings.
ing good. In 2005, Lyubomirsky and her colRegardless, when participants experienced flow,
leagues documented how happiness and positive
their motions became more regular, as they lost
feelings improve people's personal and profesthemselves in a challenging but engrossing activity.
sional lives. For example, happy people tend to
When they compared their HBM data to their daily
be more creative, are more productive at work,
diaries, participants were often surprised to see
and go on to earn higher salaries. You read that
that their mental state had such an obvious digital
right: Getting a raise won't make you happier,
signature. Once people became aware of their daily
but if you're already happy, more money is likely
buSINESS SCOPE:
patterns, they could better schedule their work to
to come your way as a side benefit. Hard statisHitachi's wearable
take advantage of times when they were most likely
tics about these positive outcomes-higher salasensor monitors
to be in this mental state.
ries, better performance evaluations, and greater
workers' movements
A more straightforward yet illuminating way
longevity-help win over skeptics to the value of
and interactions.
that we've used wearable sensors in the workhappiness research.
place is to document social interactions. You can,
In the workplace, one manifestation of being
happy is your ability to achieve a state of full engagement, for example, examine which locations in an office tend to host
or "f low," a term psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi the most frequent and active discussions, and which areas are
at Claremont Graduate University, in California, coined to underused or prone to passive interactions. Restructuring
describe this phenomenon. When it happens, hours pass by the office layout based on such results might well lead to more
like minutes, and you forget about outside worries. Nearly fruitful collaborations.
In many cases, these sociometric data reveal very different
everyone experiences flow at some point or another, including
knowledge workers such as engineers and scientists, whose patterns of communication than what you might infer from
jobs require a great deal of focused creativity and problem solv- a company's organizational chart. Let's say you're trying to
ing. As it turns out, technology can help identify this cherished gauge the effects of a corporate merger. Ideally, you want the
two companies to become completely integrated, despite what
state of mind.
may have been different cultures and work processes. Sensor
data can tell you the extent to which what were formerly two
groups are actually coming together, because they show who
in one small but intriguing study, Yano, his colleague really talks with whom and how often.
In one early experiment, the HBM was used to study the
Koji Ara, and Csikszentmihalyi looked at whether you could
quantify when people had reached that special state of being merger of two product-design units within a company. One
"in the zone." In this experiment, participants were asked to month after the combination, the resultant group remained for
36

NA * iEEE SpEctrum * dEcEmbEr 2012

spectrum.ieee.org

hitachi high technologieS

PARSING INTERACTIONS: in the diagrams of "pitcher-catcher" relationships at left, red circles represent "pitchers"-people who are more
talkative-and green circles are the less communicative "catchers." At the start of the study, office communication is mainly one-way, as shown by
the arrows. by the end, two-way interactions are the norm. in the space-utilization map at right, the circle size shows the amount of time workers
spend at various locations in an office, and the color corresponds to activity (red being active, blue being passive). Source: hitachi high technologieS

http://spectrum.ieee.org

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum December, 2012