Mental health

Swiss insurer tests laughter detector in office

The "Chief LOL Officer" is supposed to recognize how often people laugh in the office.(Bild: Baloise)

The Swiss insurance company Baloise is having the frequency of loud laughter tested in an office to improve job satisfaction. Those who laugh infrequently are sent an e-mail to cheer them up.

The device, which looks like a handy loudspeaker, has a microphone and uses artificial intelligence to measure sounds in the environment, as project manager Alexandra Toscanelli said in an interview with the Tamedia newspapers.

Baloise installed the so-called Chief LOL Officer in the offices of a long-standing business customer with ten employees, the Appenzell-based online company start-up portal Fasoon. The test is scheduled to last four weeks.

Memes to cheer you up
"On average, an adult laughs about 15 times a day, so we said: four laughs in two hours should be possible, anything less is not enough," said Toscanelli. If you laugh less often, for example because you are stressed, you get an e-mail to cheer you up.

According to Toscanelli, this could be a meme, a video of a cat falling off a table and rolling over, or someone accidentally performing a funny stunt with a scooter. A social media agency has collected the best from the Internet.

Promoting mental health
The company wants to use the project to promote mental health. One target group is small and medium-sized companies. Absenteeism and mental health are an important issue there, not least because they cost companies a lot of money. According to Baloise, Swiss companies lose 6.5 billion Swiss francs (around 6.92 billion euros) per year due to employees' poor mental health.

"Mental health problems are still talked about much less than a broken leg," said Toscanelli and admitted: "Laughter is not the solution to everything. You also have to name contact persons, hotlines and help centers."