Mediated Atmosphere Table (MAT): Adaptive Multimodal Media System for Stress Restoration

In the open-plan workspace, which has grown to more than 70% of all offices in the United States, openness and flexibility came at the cost of personal environmental control. Recent evidence has shown a decrease in worker satisfaction due to the lack of privacy and increased noise level and distraction. In this article, we present a vision for using context-aware multimodal augmentation to improve productivity and well-being in the open-plan office. We introduce the mediated atmosphere table (MAT)—a workstation combined with a network of custom environmental control devices (lighting, audio, video, airflow, heating, and scent) to alter the user’s local environment and to improve the restorative quality of the user’s personal space in the open-plan office. A preliminary user study ( $N=38$ ) examined the effect on stress development based on subjective measures of perception, as well as objective measures extracted from recordings of heart rate variability. Our findings show that MAT significantly ( $p< 0.05$ ) affects occupants’ perception, as well as their physiological response in an open-plan research workspace. Furthermore, we found a significant difference between experimental conditions with and without scent. We provide an exploratory look at the effect of scent and the applications of MAT.