The Tesserae project: Large-scale, longitudinal, in situ, multimodal sensing of information workers

The Tesserae project investigates how a suite of sensors can measure workplace performance (e.g., organizational citizenship behavior), psychological traits (e.g., personality, affect), and physical characteristics (e.g., sleep, activity) over one year. We enrolled 757 information workers across the U.S. and measure heart rate, physical activity, sleep, social context, and other aspects through smartwatches, a phone agent, beacons, and social media. We report challenges that we faced with enrollment, privacy, and incentive structures while setting up such a long-term multimodal large-scale sensor study. We discuss the tradeoffs of remote versus in-person enrollment, and showed that directly paid, in-person enrolled participants are more compliant overall compared to remotely-enrolled participants. We find that providing detailed information regarding privacy concerns up-front is highly beneficial. We believe that our experiences can benefit other large sensor projects as this field grows.