Hitachi has released a “Happiness Badge”to take the place of the ubiquitous employee badges worn on belts and on lanyards to buzz into a building or get your employee discount in the cafeteria. But the difference here is that the Hitachi badge includes an accelerometer to measure your activity, including how much you sit, stand, nod, type and walk around at work. That data is pushed through a proprietary algorithm to create… wait for it… a “Happiness Number.”
Annual surveys on employee engagement and happiness. Get lost!
Pulse surveys each month, week, day… amateur hour.
The Hitachi badge takes 50 snapshots of your happiness every second… every day… and uploads that information to cloud servers in real time.
Now that is some big-a%$ data my friend.
Read the whole post over at Symbolist (an FOT contributor blog).

Paul Hebert is Senior Account Executive at WorkStride, Inc, and a writer, speaker and consultant. Paul focuses on helping connect best-in-class incentive technology platform to behaviors you need drive business results through employees, channel partners and consumers.
Using proven motivational theory, behavioral economics and social psychology he has driven extraordinary company performance for his clients. Paul is widely considered an expert on motivation, incentives, and engagement.
Other notable activities:
- Interviewed by the BBC on executive motivation and pay
- Quoted three times in USATODAY as an expert in incentives and channel travel programs
- Published in Loyalty360 magazine
- Writer and founding member of the editorial advisory board at the HRExaminer website
- Contributing author of “Enterprise Engagement: The Textbook: A Roadmap to Achieving Organizational Results Through People”
- Contributing author of 3 books on social media “The Age of Conversation #1, #2, and #3”