The Human Dynamic Lab now boasts some 50 graduate alumni. And Pentland himself is no longer a dark horse — he’s actually more of a campus darling. Everyone I talked to refers to Pentland in the superlative: a "ridiculous" adviser, according to Thad Starner (in the best sense of the word); not just a brilliant researcher, but a brilliant mentor, according to former student Ben Waber. And Pentland’s energy — especially when it comes to students — is unflagging. "I don’t think he sleeps a ton," Waber confesses.

The dedication shows. Of Pentland’s former students, roughly half are tenured faculty at various institutions, and the rest are working in industry, either leading research groups or heading up their own companies. And the overwhelming majority of those companies was co-founded, sponsored, or advised by Pentland — each devoted to bringing a separate facet of wearable tech to the general public.

The latest Pentland project to garner significant attention is the sociometer. It’s a deceptively simple device roughly the size of a card deck that’s equipped with an accelometer to measure your movement, a microphone to capture your voice, Bluetooth to detect other sociometers nearby, and, finally, an infrared sensor to tell when you’re engaging those nearby people face-to-face — capabilities that Pentland believes can be used nearly everywhere: in medical settings, to determine if someone is depressed or sick; businesses, where companies can gauge employee happiness and productivity; and think-tanks and entrepreneurial environments, where sociometric data can help badge-wearers maximize personal and team creativity and innovation. Pentland insists that, to mitigate privacy concerns, most sociometers record only voice and speech patterns instead of actual words. He’s been developing the device for close to 15 years, and has already had people wear it for weeks at a time. One study revealed that the sociometer helps discern when someone is bluffing at poker roughly 70 percent of the time; another found that a wearer can determine who will win a negotiation within the first five minutes with 87 percent accuracy; yet another concluded that one can accurately predict the success of a speed date before the participants do.

Pentland has now amassed over 100 metrics that often tell you more about a person than their actual words

Over the last decade, sociometric data has advanced far beyond these initial demonstrations. Using data collected over dozens of human studies, both in labs and the field, Pentland has now amassed over 100 metrics that often tell you more about a person than their actual words. In voice and posture, you can read the signs of depression and happiness, engagement and boredom. In the frequency and nature of an interaction, you can decode signals of job satisfaction and productivity. You can tell when a group is likely to innovate and when it's apt to become mired in inertia. You can, it seems, even predict the onset of Parkinson’s.

Pentland’s newest spin-off, Sociometric Solutions, is now working on developing the sociometer even further. As of 2013, the device has been used by dozens of research groups and companies, including members of the Fortune 1000. Last year, MIT alum Waber (who’s leading the venture) and Pentland conducted a study alongside a research group at Cornell University to see if they could push the sociometer’s capabilities to the next level. By analyzing nothing more than the tone of someone’s voice, the team accurately predicted the level of cortisol in their saliva — indicating how stressed they were now, and how stressed they were likely to be in the near future. "From an evolutionary point of view, it makes a huge amount of sense," Pentland says. "You can imagine back in the day, when you were about to go hunt a mammoth, it would be good to know who was feeling good and who was feeling sick and who was enthusiastic and who wasn’t. So, we developed these signals, not language but something older than language." And back come the beavers. "It’s like watching beavers from outer space, like Jane Goodall watching gorillas. You observe from a distance."

At last, Pentland can not only count his beavers from space, but predict where they will go, how they will interact, what might happen to them in the future — and how all of those outcomes can, in turn, be improved. In 1998, he predicted that "[wearables] can extend one’s senses, improve memory, aid the wearer’s social life and even help him or her stay calm and collected." With the sociometer, he envisions that they’ll do even more than that: the wearables of the near future could improve collective intelligence, the way society functions on the broadest level.

But a future where wearable technology yields objective data that improves our lives and our society isn’t a guarantee. Just as Pentland’s work on wearables was met with distrust among his MIT colleagues in its earliest days, wearables continue to be met with skepticism, much of it deserved, today. Businesses ranging from a Seattle cafe to a Vegas strip club are banning devices like Google Glass entirely. In April, yet another hapless Glass wearer — a 20-year-old journalist from Business Insider walking in San Francisco’s Mission district — had the device ripped from his face and smashed on the asphalt.

In part, such unease can be explained by an underlying distrust in technology intruding on human interaction. We look at our phones more than each other, check our Twitter feeds rather than engage in real-world interaction. Aren’t Google Glass or sociometers just a step in that same direction, devices that limit our sociability and harm our intelligence? After all, it’s simple for me to miss what you’re saying if I’m pulling up a reference from your last sentence or distracted by an alarm I’d set earlier. And yes, there is the fear of memory erosion — the so-called Google effect. If you can constantly access everything, why remember anything?