Exploring Workplace Behaviors through Speaking Patterns using Large-scale Multimodal Wearable Recordings: A Study of Healthcare Providers

Abstract: Interpersonal spoken communication is central to human interaction and the exchange of information. Such interactive processes involve not only speech and spoken language but also non-verbal cues such as hand gestures, facial expressions, and nonverbal vocalization, that are used to express feelings and provide feedback. These multimodal communication signals carry a variety of information about the people: traits like gender and age as well as about physical and psychological states and behavior. This work uses wearable multimodal sensors to investigate interpersonal communication behaviors focusing on speaking patterns among healthcare providers with a focus on nurses. We analyze longitudinal data collected from $99$ nurses in a large hospital setting over ten weeks. The results indicate that speaking pattern differences across shift schedules and working units. Moreover, results show that speaking patterns combined with physiological measures can be used to predict affect measures and life satisfaction scores. The implementation of this work can be accessed at https://github.com/usc-sail/tiles-audio-arousal.