  Corporate responses to illness is currently an ad-hoc, subjective process
that has little basis in data on how disease actually spreads at the workplace.
Additionally, many studies have shown that productivity is not an individual
factor but a social one: in any study on epidemic responses this social factor
has to be taken into account. The barrier to addressing this problem has been
the lack of data on the interaction and mobility patterns of people in the
workplace. We have created a wearable Sociometric Badge that senses
interactions between individuals using an infra-red (IR) transceiver and
proximity using a radio transmitter. Using the data from the Sociometric
Badges, we are able to simulate diseases spreading through face-to-face
interactions with realistic epidemiological parameters. In this paper we
construct a curve trading off productivity with epidemic potential. We are able
to take into account impacts on productivity that arise from social factors,
such as interaction diversity and density, which studies that take an
individual approach ignore. We also propose new organizational responses to
diseases that take into account behavioral patterns that are associated with a
more virulent disease spread. This is advantageous because it will allow
companies to decide appropriate responses based on the organizational context
of a disease outbreak.
