  The collaboration of several people in groups is becoming more and more
important nowadays. Teamwork is often used for decision-making processes and
for solving complex problems. Research in this area focuses on the
quantification and analysis of behavior within and between groups. By using
wearable electronic devices, such as badges, this quantification can be
performed automatically and with high accuracy. The goal of this work is the
design and implementation of a new firmware for the badges of the Rhythm
project - an open-source project of the Human Dynamics Group of the MIT Media
Lab. The firmware is characterized by a modular and extensible architecture and
combines different techniques. These include a filesystem, which efficiently
stores sequentially generated data based on a virtual memory abstraction, a
serialization library, which enables a platform-independent exchange of
structured data, and a time synchronization technique, which compensates
frequency deviations of the oscillator. In addition, an automated test
environment was designed for the verification of individual functional software
components of the application. As a result of detailed analysis and special
measures, the power consumption could be significantly reduced compared to the
previous implementation. Due to the hierarchical and modular structure and the
high degree of abstraction, the developed techniques can also be integrated
into other projects and platforms.
