Dr Chris Brauer is a senior lecturer in the Institute of Management Studies and Founder of the Centre for Creative & Social Technologies(CAST) at Goldsmiths, University of London. Follow him on Twitter. "Thinking Business" focuses on the psychology of getting ahead in the workplace by exploring techniques to boost employee performance, increase creativity and productivity.
(CNN) -- With great power comes great responsibility. There is some confusion over whether this quote should be attributed to Voltaire or Spiderman.
Either way, the message
is the same and one that should be resonating with the inventors,
companies, brands, media, policy makers and industries hitching a ride
on the innovation bullet train of wearable technologies.
Wearable tech
Our original Human Cloud research project at
Goldsmiths, University of London in partnership with cloud computing
provider Rackspace focused on the socio-economic impact of wearable
technology moving from novelty and entertainment to health and
lifestyle.
We conducted a survey of
4,000 adults in the UK and US and spent six weeks with 26 participants
experimenting with these new technologies, from fitness bands like the
Fitbit, Jawbone Up and Nike Fuelband, to sensor-based wearable cameras
like the Autographer.
With echoes of Stephen
Hawking's voice on Radiohead's "OK Computer" album, participants
experimenting with wearable technologies felt fitter (68%), happier
(75%), and more productive (84%).
The nuances of the human
experience was reflected in the six archetypes of wearable technology
users we identified from deep qualitative research from the curious,
controllers, and quantified selfers to the self-medics, finish line
fanatics, and ubiquitors.
"As you can see, today
has not gone well so far," says one self-medic participant mournfully,
looking at two graphs: one shows he only took 394 steps that day, the
other that he only got five hours 28 minutes sleep. When asked why he
wears technology, his answer is to "prevent delusion" and so that
function is at least achieved.
Privacy remains a key issue, but it is a multifaceted and complex discussion.
Twenty percent of survey
respondents wanted to see Google Glass banned entirely from public
spaces, but the same percentage were willing to share the data from
wearable devices with government to improve services.
The argument from our
'controller' archetype is that their data is already valuable, the
question is who is benefiting and exploiting this value.
Dr Chris Brauer
Fernando Pessoa wrote
that it is the fate of everyone in this life to be exploited so is it
worse to be exploited by Senhor Vasques [his employer] and his textile
company than by vanity, glory, resentment, envy, or the impossible?
This is a question all
of us must answer, particularly as the fine line between the possible
and the seemingly impossible is breached nearly every day by one form of
emerging technology or another fueled by the exponential growth of
computing power, storage, bandwidth, nanotechnology, and big data.
One of the most
intriguing findings of the initial phase of the research was the way
early adopter companies were starting to explore the power of wearable
tech in the workplace.
Several companies
reported issuing laptops, mobile phones, and fitness bands to all
employees as part of standard corporate kit. This stimulated our
imagination and led to the next phase of our research now underway with
Rackspace.
We are looking at a big
data mash-up where the wearable tech human cloud meets the productivity
and performance corporate cloud to amplify the role of the human cloud
at work.
Wearable tech data from employees and customers are an inevitable key ingredient in the recipes for making sense of big data.
Dr Chris Brauer
Dr Chris Brauer
For businesses
experimenting with these technologies there are implications for
occupational psychology, systems development, insight and analytics,
leadership, competitive advantage, environmental analysis and workplace
design.
Three billion gigabytes
of big data are generated every day, but only one-half of one percent of
this data gets analyzed and put to work.
Wearable tech data from
employees and customers are an inevitable key ingredient in the recipes
for making sense of big data and the role of emerging technologies in
shaping our cities, societies, markets and economies.
This big data stew can
be augmented with cognitive and decision-support systems like IBM
Watson, the computing service that famously triumphed on Jeopardy in
2011, now deployed in the cloud diagnosing and helping treat cancer
patients.
With real-time access to
human data in the workplace systems like Watson can potentially support
specific decisions and scenarios in relation to your personal Human
Cloud. We recognize it is not all about opportunities.
There are obvious
surveillance implications and risks inherent in these kinds of dynamic
data driven integrations of networks of people and systems.
Analysts at Credit
Suisse suggest the wearable tech market will grow from $1.4bn (£878m) in
annual sales this year to $50bn (£31.3bn) by 2018.
Your friendly
neighborhood Spiderman also said some spiders change colors to blend
into their environment. It's a defense mechanism.
Wearable technologies
are in the midst of this blending and soon will diffuse subtly but
powerfully into the fabric of everyday lives so as to be unrecognizable
as a distinct innovation domain.
At this stage it is the great responsibility of every one of us to consider those implications.
Link to: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/10/21/business/can-wearable-technoloy-boost-productivity/index.html?hpt=ibu_c1
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