Sensing spatial and temporal coordination in teams using the smartphone

Abstract

Teams are at the heart of today’s organizations and their performance is crucial for organizational success. It is therefore important to understand and monitor team processes. Traditional approaches employ questionnaires, which have low temporal resolution or manual behavior observation, which is labor intensive and thus costly. In this work, we propose to apply mobile behavior sensing to capture team coordination processes in an automatic manner, thereby enabling cost-effective and real-time monitoring of teams. In particular, we use the built-in sensors of smartphones to sense interpersonal body movement alignment and to detect moving sub-groups. We aggregate the data on team level in form of networks that capture a) how long team members are together in a sub-group and b) how synchronized team members move. Density and centralization metrics extract team coordination indicators from the team networks. We demonstrate the validity of our approach in firefighting teams performing a realistic training scenario and investigate the link between the coordination indicators and team performance as well as experienced team coordination. Our method enables researchers and practitioners alike to capture temporal and spatial team coordination automatically and objectively in real-time.