TILES Project

TILES (Tracking Individual Performance with Sensors) was a large-scale, longitudinal study tracking hospital workers’ physiology, environment, sleep, and behavior using wearable and ambient sensors, in order to understand how individual differences, mental states, and well-being affect job performance.

The study focused specifically on nurses and other healthcare professionals, since burnout rates in that field are high and stand to reveal unique insights into how different individuals cope with daily stress and continue to thrive in the workplace despite high physical and emotional demands. Researchers at USC, the University of Washington, INRS-EMT/Université du Québec, and Evidation Health partnered with the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) to carry out the study, which collected physiologic data (via wearable sensors), environmental data (via ambient sensors), and behavioral data (via surveys) from a cohort of up to 250 nurses and healthcare professionals over the course of 10 weeks at a time, day and night shifts included.

The project produced two publicly released datasets, TILES-2018 and TILES-2019 (see Publications).