Sensor-Based Smart Hot-Desking for Improvement of Office Well-Being

Abstract

Traditional hot-desking is a method of office resource management where a single office desk is shared by multiple employees at different times, instead of each one being assigned an individual desk. Utilising the desks in this manner can reduce the size of the office by up to 30% [9]. However there are numerous problems with the traditional approach, in particular with regards to desk personalisation, availability of preferred desks and the development of synergies between people doing similar work. The objective of this paper is to develop a smart hot-desking system that assigns temporary desks to employees in a way that takes into advantage personal preferences as well as spatial and temporal features in order to tackle the aforementioned issues and ultimately increase their well-being and productivity. Sensors distributed in space measure the temperature, light and noise level in different areas of an office, in order for an algorithm to be able to determine an optimal desk for a specific employee, according to their prerecorded preferences. We performed an experiment with students in a university lab, with the majority of the users showing notable increase in their satisfaction with the working environment, as a result of the system allocating them desks. We discuss our experimental setup, observations about the process and develop the concept further so that richer data can be fused in the future to inform even more meaningful desk allocation (e.g. calendar and to do lists). This pilot study demonstrates the feasibility of combining realtime environmental sensor data and employees' feedback to produce a scalable desk allocation system.