Staff of at least four British companies, including a high-street bank, are understood to be wearing “sociometric badges” GETTY IMAGESCompanies are using wearable sensors to spy on employees’ conversations, fitness and sleep patterns in an effort to develop individuals who are “the ultimate productivity unit”. Staff of at least four British companies, including a high-street bank, and parts of the NHS, are understood to be wearing credit card-sized “sociometric badges”. These are equipped with microphones and sensors to follow their speech, movement and proximity to colleagues. The badges can also infer stress levels based on heart rate and voice inflection. Humanyze, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology spin-off that makes the badges and analytics software, told The Sunday Times that bosses could only see aggregated data and the idea was to identify patterns that could be used to make changes in the workplace and boost…

Source: The Times January 16, 2017 00:07 UTC