06
What's Next?
The
WEARABLE
LIVES
of
well beings
More than half of Australians use wearable devices, and wearables
are already starting to play a role in risk-management and injury
prevention. But why is uptake so slow, and how can businesses take
advantage of this popular consumer technology?
The future of wearable technology is in the workplace,
not at home. This statement was made more than
two years ago by Bill Bartow, vice president of global
product management at Kronos Incorporated, in
a prescient interview with Training magazine. The
market was trumpeting the future of domestic, not
corporate, wearables – so what’s changed?
More than half of Australians now sport a wearable
device, according to professional services firm PwC.
Last year, PwC surveyed 500 people about their
“wearable life”, finding that 55% owned a wearable
device, and uptake was driven mainly by health
(85%), technology proficiency (80%) and parenting
and productivity (77%).
Contrast this with 43% of Australians who reported
using a wearable device for work in 2015, and it looks
like corporate wearables aren’t lagging quite so far
behind.
“Wearables are still very much a personal device,”
says John Riccio, partner and digital services leader
at PwC Australia. “They have two functions per se
– a big part of it is health tracking and monitoring.
The other part is that it mostly acts as an extension
of a mobile phone, making your smartphone
functionality available on your wrist.”
The two trends driving organisational uptake of
wearable technologies in the short-to-medium
term are improving workforce health and safety
and exploring the Internet of
Things to improve business
“The value of data
efficiency.
lies only in our
ability to use it as
In industries that operate actionable insights.”
in high-risk environments,
such as mining or oil and gas, wearables are already
starting to play a role in risk-management and injury
prevention. Truck drivers working in coalmines in
NSW’s Hunter Valley have been using SmartCap,
a wearable device that looks like a baseball cap,
to detect fatigue and alert drivers in danger of
falling asleep. For most other industries, the use
of wearables in the workforce is mainly limited to
health monitoring.
A significant barrier to entry for businesses is the
complexity and cost of data collection, analysis and
usage. The wearables are useless on their own – it’s
the data that has value.
“The cost of managing data collected from wearables
can be significant,” Riccio says. “Aside from being
extremely expensive, people are still trying to work
out how to use the collected data. We need help to
summarise data as insights before we can actually
turn it over to humans to use it. The value of data
lies only in our ability to use it as actionable insights.”
Riccio believes it will be at least another five years
before we see wearables bring significant benefits
and become part of the corporate mainstream in
Australia.
“Some employers are experimenting with how they
can use wearables to manage employee health and
safety,” Riccio says. “These experiments are mostly
in the pilot mode – they too are trying to understand
what you can do with data.”
The problem, he says, arises when an organisation
does not have the skills to interpret the data in
the right way. “People might not be comfortable
with real-time monitoring of their heart rate or
whereabouts,” he says.
“There is this interesting cultural and human
behaviour where we’re happy for Google to know
everything we do, but we have a problem with the
same thing in the workplace. People forget that if
you carry a phone in your pocket, you are being
monitored.”
Riccio believes millennials (born between about 1980
and 2002) will be the most challenging adopters of
wearables in the workplace due to their suspicion of
sharing information with corporations.
“They are happy to share stuff; indeed, they might
be the most sharing generation ever,” Riccio says.
“However, they are very particular about who they
share their information with. Understanding how
their data will be used and ensuring that employees
see the benefit of why monitoring is being done
is paramount in getting people to comply with
wearable projects.”
Subscribe for future editions
UP NEXT →
DRIVING DEMAND: THE EVOLUTION OF COMPLIANCE
Workforce Life | ISSUE 03