Group Cohesion for a Coaching System in Co-located Collaborative Environments

Technologies that support co-located collaboration must not only provide a shared workspace, but also support collaboration. From an observational study, some collaboration problems were identified in groups of people working in a system with a Tangible User Interface. Some of these problems could be identified and prevented with the support of Coaching System. This system encourages interactions between group members through Social Interventions. To develop a Coaching System, it is necessary to know the cohesion between the members of the group, in order to decide the appropriate Social Interventions. In this paper, a model is proposed to represent the social interactions that occur in a group of people when performing a task. Interactions can be analyzed to determine the degree of cohesiveness of a group and support the collaboration.