Wearables creating more data-driven workplace

Wearables and tracking tags are being used more frequently in a wider variety of workplaces to collect statistics on employee productivity, health and satisfaction — tracking the performance of professional athletes, helping doctors get to hospital patients quicker, and even monitoring stress levels of office workers. Daniel Rainham, associate professor and wearable sensor researcher at Dalhousie University, said in a phone interview that wearable sensors and trackers have been used for many years in manufacturing processing fields and industrial environments. Now, he said, technological advancements are allowing fields unrelated to blue-collar work to utilize radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags and wearable devices to track movement and collect statistics on employees. Some hospitals, for example, require specialists to wear a RFID tag, and will place trackers on doorways. That way, the hospital “will know when to get the right doctor at the right time, at the right place,” Rainham said. “They also use trackers to assess the ergonomics of how far an employee would have to walk during the course of the day during their job, and will try to assess if there is a way of making it easier and faster” to get a doctor to an emergency. Paul Hamerman, workplace technology analyst at Forrester Research Inc., said in a phone interview that wearables are also used to monitor professional athletes "to monitor and collect big data on athlete performance, monitoring physical indicators, heart rate, etc." He said using wearables in the workplace would be valuable in physically demanding jobs, where safety precautions have to be taken to ensure employees’ health. “I think it’s totally inevitable that it will be used in the workplace … but I think of it as an element of safety or monitoring health of workers that are in jobs where they are exerting themselves physically, whether it’s sports or some other kind of job that is physically demanding,” Hamerman added. In a follow up email, Hamerman said the advantage of using wearables in a work environment is the ability to collect real-time data, including on “motion, location, heart rate, skin temperature respiratory condition.” He added that “in the future, the range of devices and data will expand exponentially, and our ability to analyze and interpret data will improve as well.” For example, devices could be implanted or ingested, he added. Boston-based Humanyze makes work-badge wearables that hang around an employee’s neck and are embedded with microphones and precision positioning technology to analyze an employee’s voice, Bloomberg reported earlier this month. The article reported the Bank of America used the badge to get statistics on how loudly employees spoke, whether their voice indicated stress and how the way they speak was related to productivity in the workplace. After gathering statistics, Bank of America noticed that employees “with the closest ties to others in their group were more productive,” and implemented shared coffee breaks in the daily routines of its workers. There was a 10 per cent increase in productivity as a result, the article indicated. Tom Emrich, Toronto-based wearable tech consultant, said in a phone interview that more companies are likely to use wearables, but to do so in a transparent way, where the type of information that is being collected is clear to both the employee and the manager. He said, in the future, it will be possible for employers to capitalize on wearables that are already being used by people, rather than handing out wearables to collect data. “I think that employers in the future are going to tap into wearables and smart environments that are already there via software and algorithms. It isn’t my boss giving me a wearable; it’s my boss using my wearable that I have,” Emrich said. He said if employers are going to use wearables to help understand how their workers are feeling and their productivity, then what is most important is making sure that the technology being used has the right software and algorithms to collect the right data. Emrich said the future HR professionals is going to be more oriented toward making decisions based on data as opposed to "gut" feelings. Dalhousie University’s Rainham cautioned that gathering data on employees might not always present a picture that's accurate. “If it comes to a person’s feelings or stress for example, first off, is it the work environment that’s causing the stress or is it something external? It may be that someone’s wife just texted them and said, 'I’m sorry I’m leaving you,' and that has nothing to do with the workplace,” said Rainham. He questioned how data would be effectively managed when wearables are used in an office environment, especially when it comes to gathering information like employee satisfaction, health statistics and productivity. “It’s a lot of data, and if you’re going to look at it from a managerial standpoint, I’d be asking, what am I going to do with all this information?” — With reporting by Shruti Shekar at sshekar@thewirereport.ca and editing by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca and Derek Abma at dabma@thewirereport.ca

Wearables creating more data-driven workplace

Broadcast | August 21, 2015

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