From a 1995 issue of Radio Ink and an interview with Pierre Bouvard, then Arbitron's GM under Steve Morris.
INK: What about the people meter?
BOUVARD: We are in a joint venture with BBM (the Canadian version of Arbitron* and are spending a lot of time and energy testing the people meter There are so many issues for us to test with this I'll give you a basic one. Somebody is wearing the people meter, which is a beeper-1ike device that records encoded audio signals passively How do you know if the person is at home, in the car, or at work? You know, it seems a strong part of Radio is the ability to get people outside the home How do you determine that? They are doing things right now like looking at patterns of listening or the vibration that occurs when you're in the car, verses when you are stationary So we are spending a lot of energy in testing, but I think the key point is that we are not about to just drop a new methodology into Radio before we've really done our homework on it At this point we are still in the testing phase
INK: What about the people meter?
BOUVARD: We are in a joint venture with BBM (the Canadian version of Arbitron* and are spending a lot of time and energy testing the people meter There are so many issues for us to test with this I'll give you a basic one. Somebody is wearing the people meter, which is a beeper-1ike device that records encoded audio signals passively How do you know if the person is at home, in the car, or at work? You know, it seems a strong part of Radio is the ability to get people outside the home How do you determine that? They are doing things right now like looking at patterns of listening or the vibration that occurs when you're in the car, verses when you are stationary So we are spending a lot of energy in testing, but I think the key point is that we are not about to just drop a new methodology into Radio before we've really done our homework on it At this point we are still in the testing phase