Did you take a break today? Detecting playing foosball using your smartwatch

Abstract

Prolonged working hours are a primary cause of stress, work related injuries (e.g, RSIs), and work-life imbalance in employees at a workplace. As reported by some studies, taking timely breaks from continuous work not only reduces stress and exhaustion but also improves productivity, employee bonding, and camaraderie. Our goal is to build a system that automatically detects breaks thereby assisting in maintaining healthy work-break balance. In this paper, we focus on detecting foosball breaks of employees at a workplace using a smartwatch. We selected foosball as it is one of the most commonly played games at many workplaces in the United States. Since playing foosball involves wrist and hand movement, a wrist-worn device (e.g., a smartwatch), due to its position, has a clear advantage over a smartphone for detecting foosball activity. Our evaluation using data collected from real workplace shows that we can identify with more than 95% accuracy whether a person is playing foosball or not. We also show that we can determine how long a foosball session lasted with an error of less than 3% in the best case.