The potential of wearable technology for monitoring social interactions based on interpersonal synchrony

Abstract

Sensing data from wearables have been extensively evaluated for fitness tracking, health monitoring or rehabilitation of individuals. However, we believe that wearable sensing can go beyond the individual and offer insights into social dynamics and interactions with other users by considering multi-user data. In this work, we present a new approach to using wrist-worn wearables for social monitoring and the detection of social interaction features based on interpersonal synchrony - an approach transferable to smart-watches and fitness trackers. We build up on related work in the field of psychology and present a study where we collected wearable sensing data during a social event with 24 participants. Our preliminary results indicate differences in wearable sensing data during a social interaction between two people.