TeamSense: Assessing Personal Affect and Group Cohesion in Small Teams through Dyadic Interaction and Behavior Analysis with Wearable Sensors.

Continuous monitoring with unobtrusive wearable social sensors is becoming a popular method to assess individual affect states and team effectiveness in human research. A large number of applications have demonstrated the effectiveness of applying wearable sensing in corporate settings; for example, in short periodic social events or in a university campus. However, little is known of how we can automatically detect individual affect and group cohesion for long duration missions. Predicting negative affect states and low cohesiveness is vital for team missions. Knowing team members' negative states allows timely interventions to enhance their effectiveness. This work investigates whether sensing social interactions and individual behaviors with wearable sensors can provide insights into assessing individual affect states and group cohesion. We analyzed wearable sensor data from a team of six crew members who were deployed on a four-month simulation of a space exploration mission at a remote location. Our work proposes to recognize team members' affect states and group cohesion as a binary classification problem using novel behavior features that represent dyadic interaction and individual activities. Our method aggregates features from individual members into group levels to predict team cohesion. Our results show that the behavior features extracted from the wearable social sensors provide useful information in assessing personal affect and team cohesion. Group task cohesion can be predicted with a high performance of over 0.8 AUC. Our work demonstrates that we can extract social interactions from sensor data to predict group cohesion in longitudinal missions. We found that quantifying behavior patterns including dyadic interactions and face-to-face communications are important in assessing team process.