‘MIND’ YOUR BIZ!
Office brain sensors
Hate it when your boss is on your back? Imagine if he or she were in your head.
That’s already a reality for workers in China, where employers are strapping brain-wave-reading helmets to the heads of workers in an effort to monitor their every feeling and improve efficiency.
Like a scene from a dystopian sci-fi movie, employees at factories, power plants and on the transit system are laboring while wearing caps with sensors that can detect spikes in depression, anxiety and rage, the South China Morning Post reported.
Artificial-intelligence algorithms then crunch the data to determine if a particular worker is laboring to his or her full potential — or needs to be replaced.
The State Grid power company, which has 40,000 employees, is so high on the mood-monitoring tech, it credits the devices for boosting profits by about $315 million since 2014.
“There is no doubt about its effect,” said Cheng Jingzhou, who oversees the company’s “emotional surveillance” program.
The government-funded project, called Neuro Cap, has since expanded to more than a dozen factories and businesses.
Jin Jia, an associate professor of brain science and cognitive psychology at Ningbo University, where the project was developed, said the brain caps allow workers to be better managed.
The head gear can help prevent an emotional production-line worker from having a total meltdown, according to Cheng.
“When the system issues a warning, the manager asks the worker to take a day off or move to a less critical post. Some jobs require high concentration. There is no room for a mistake,” she said.
Jin acknowledged that at first, workers were wary about their bosses tapping into their heads.
“They thought we could read their mind. This caused some discomfort and resistance in the beginning,” she said. “After a while they got used to the device.
“It looked and felt just like a safety helmet. They wore it all day at work.”
The devices are also being worn by train conductors along the busy high-speed Beijing-Shanghai line, according to Shanghai technology company Deayea.
Sensors that are located in the brim of the drivers’ hats can monitor fatigue and attention loss with more than 90 percent accuracy — as well as trigger an alert in the cabin if a driver dozes off.
Qiao Zhian, professor of management psychology at Beijing Normal University, said the technology could give companies a competitive boost — but warned it could also be a drastic invasion of privacy.
“There is no law or regulation to limit the use of this kind of equipment in China. The employer may have a strong incentive to use the technology for higher profit, and the employees are usually in too weak a position to say no,” he said. “The selling of Facebook data is bad enough. Brain surveillance can take privacy abuse to a whole new level.”