The ideal employee: happy, and therefore more productive. But how can bosses know if their team is indeed happy?

It's all in the moves, says Kazuo Yano, whose company, Happiness Planet Ltd., developed a wearable sensor it says assesses happiness by monitoring a staff member's body movements.

Yano hit on the idea of measuring people’s happiness levels with acceleration sensors while working at Hitachi Ltd.

Acting on the thought that “people move their bodies in the same way when feeling happy and those motions can be gauged objectively,” Yano and his colleagues started a service that numerically ranks a person's quality of life and began offering it to businesses through their own company.

Yano expects higher happiness levels for individuals and groups will result in clear positive effects for businesses such as “improved productivity” and “lowered worker turnover rates,” and believes his criteria will facilitate smoother management of businesses and organizations.

"In business management, the priority is on improving efficiency," Yano said. “But companies are driven by humans who have emotions. We will create a new value where happiness indexes are used for management.”

While Yano and his Happiness Planet colleagues concluded “happiness cannot be defined” after spending years sifting through data on tens of thousands of people, the engineers were able to roughly predict sensor users’ answers to such questions as “When were you happiest this week?” and “What day did you feel lonely?” based on information collected with the acceleration sensors.

Yano credits being potentially sidelined as an employee in middle age for setting him on the path to finding a method to evaluate happiness.

In autumn 2002, he was forced to make a painful decision at Hitachi. As head of the firm’s research and development department of semiconductor chips, he had to ask his 50 subordinates to choose whether to remain or leave for a new company.

In the aftermath of a recession, Hitachi and Mitsubishi Electric Corp. were to found Renesas Technology Corp. based on their semiconductor businesses half a year later. Yano was torn between staying or leaving himself.

More than half of his department’s staff members relocated to Renesas Technology, but Yano made up his mind to keep committing himself to Hitachi, which no longer had a semiconductor section.

Yano was then in his 40s and served as management personnel.

“I felt it was too early for me to retire but too late to start on new endeavors,” said Yano. “I had no choice but to stay.”

Since entering Hitachi in 1984, Yano had fully devoted himself to semiconductors.

Though Japan-made technologies took the world by storm during the 1980s, the competitiveness of Japanese corporations was gradually undermined. To address the situation, the Renesas brand was introduced to harness the expertise of Japanese firms on semiconductors.

“I wondered why we had to give up because we still had confidence in our technologies,” said Yano, expressing his anger and regret over his employer’s decision to withdraw from the market.

Continuing to work at Hitachi, Yano held talks with around a dozen remaining engineers. They all were deprived of their original research tasks and considered themselves as “something outside the mainstream” within the company.

It was around the time that cellphone use exploded. People's lives became far more intertwined with computers and numerical data began to play a much larger role in analysis.

Seeing that occurring, Yano and his colleagues had the foresight to realize “data on consumers will someday be deemed an asset.”

They used themselves for a test: the engineers wore acceleration sensors around their necks to detect motions so that their daily movements could be converted into computerized information.

Measurements were made at intervals of 10 seconds. When they were stuck, “0” was recorded. The number “1” meant they were moving. The data was displayed by the arrangements of 0 and 1.

The engineers hypothesized that mankind’s common habits can be depicted via binary number patterns, and examined the data’s correlations with other kinds of information with the cooperation of corporations and schools.

Yano and his co-workers proposed turning their idea into a commercial reality but their suggestions were rejected for 15 years. Before they knew it, they had accumulated data on tens of thousands of people gathered for a total of 10 million days.

Yano’s own happiness has been on a continuous gradual rise since he started the project a decade and a half ago.

In July 2020, Hitachi set up Happiness Planet, a new firm with 10 or so employees, to “measure the degrees of happiness so services to improve business operations can be provided.” Yano became its president, nearly 18 years after he decided to remain at Hitachi.