The Design and Development of a Mood Sensing and Inducing Arduino Prototype for Promoting Employees' Positive Mood and Work Performance

This inter-disciplinary project aims to test an innovative research idea on promoting employees' positive mood in the workplace using the cutting-edge prototyping technologies by examining from business, electronic engineering and positive psychology perspectives. Along with the increasing recognition of the importance of employees' positive mood in organizations, it is commonly believed that employees with higher positive mood will have higher self-efficacy, more co-worker helping behavior and higher task persistence etc., leading to better task performance. It can also save huge productivity lost due to employees' negative mood. However, despite the benefits of employees' positive mood, there is very little research evidence addressing the innovative and feasible solutions for this important aspect. Therefore, the objectives of this proposed project are to design and develop a mood sensing and inducing Arduino prototype to promote employees' positive mood, and run a pilot study using a longitudinal multi-method including observation, interviews and survey. The pilot study is to further calibrate the Arduino prototype and evaluate its effects on sensing and inducing employees' positive mood and the three dimensions of work performance. The findings of this project will provide theoretical and practical insights into the effectiveness of employees' positive mood inducing technologies on work performance.