Is Business Ready for Wearable Computers? Wearable computing is starting to take off. its warehouse operations. Location graphics are Smartwatches, smart glasses, smart ID badges, and displayed on smart glasses guiding staffers through activity trackers promise to change how we go about the warehouse to both speed the process of find- each day and the way we do our jobs. According to ing items and reduce errors. The company says the Gartner Inc., sales of wearables will increase from technology delivered a 25 percent increase in ef- 275 million units in 2016 to 477 million units by ficiency. Vision picking gives workers locational in- 2020. Although smartwatches such as the Apple formation about the items they need to retrieve and Watch and fitness trackers have been successful allows them to automatically scan retrieved items. consumer products, business uses for wearables ap- Future enhancements will enable the system to plot pear to be advancing more rapidly. A report from optimal routes through the warehouse, provide pic- research firm Tractica projects that worldwide sales tures of items to be retrieved a key aid in case an for enterprise wearables will increase exponentially item has been misplaced on the warehouse shelves), to 66.4 million units by 2021. and instruct workers on loading carts and pallets Doctors and nurses are using smart eyewear more efficiently. for hands-free access to patients' medical records. Google has developed Glass Enterprise Edition Oil rig workers sport smart helmets to connect smart glasses for business use, with its development with land-based experts, who can view their work partners creating applications for specific indus- remotely and communicate instructions. Warehouse tries such as manufacturing and healthcare. Glass managers are able to capture real-time performance Enterprise Edition is being touted as a tool for eas- data using a smartwatch to better manage distribu- ing workflows by removing distractions that prevent tion and fulfillment operations. Wearable computing employees from remaining engaged and focused on devices improve productivity by delivering informa- tasks. More than 50 businesses including Dignity tion to workers without requiring them to interrupt Health, The Boeing Company, and Volkswagen have their tasks, which in turn empowers employees to been using Glass to complete their work more rap- make more-informed decisions more quickly. idly and efficiently. Wearable devices are helping businesses learn Duke Energy has been piloting the use of smart more about employees and the everyday workplace glasses, and sees multiple uses for them. According than ever before. New insights and information can to Aleksandar Vukojevic, technology development be uncovered as IoT sensor data is correlated to manager for Duke Energy's Emerging Technologies actual human behavior. Information on task dura- Office, smart glasses can enable employees working tion and the proximity of one device or employee in the field to access training or instructional videos to another, when combined with demographic data, to help with equipment repairs or upgrades. The can shed light on previously unidentified workflow glasses also allow remote management, enabling inefficiencies. Technologically sophisticated firms managers to capture what a line or transformer will understand things they never could before about worker sees, annotate images and video with in- workers and customers; what they do every day, how structions, and send them back out to workers in healthy they are, where they go, and even how well the field. Duke also tried out the smart glasses in its they feel. This obviously has implications for protect- warehouses for stock inventory. As a worker looks at ing individual privacy, raising potential employee an item code, it's automatically recorded against an (and customer) fears that businesses are collecting existing database. sensitive data about them. Businesses will need to There are some challenges. Locking down data trcad carcfully. that's acccsscd with smart glasses is csscntial, as Global logistics company DHL worked with with any other mobile device used in the enterprise. Ricoh, the imaging and electronics company, and Today's smart glasses haven't been designed with Ubimax, a wearable computing services and solu- security in mind. The sensors in the smart glasses tions company, to implement "vision picking" in are also not as accurate as other products. A field worker using smart glasses to locate a breaker or other device might be off by 10 or 15 feet using Google's GPS instead of a military-grade solu- tion more common to the energy industry, which can locate equipment to within one centimeter. Additionally, smart glasses don't necessarily allow safety glasses to be worn over them. Integrating data from smart glasses with Duke's internal databases could prove difficult. Smart glasses are like smartphones. Without integration with internal content and the right ap- plications, they would not be so useful. The value of wearable computing devices isn't from transferring the same information from a laptop or smartphone to a smartwatch or eyeglass display. Rather, it's about finding ways to use wearables to augment and enhance business processes. Successful adoption of wearable computing depends not only on cost effec- tiveness but on the development of new and better apps and integration with existing IT infrastructure and the organization's tools for managing and securing mobile devices (see the chapter-ending case study). Sources: George Thangadurai, "Wearables at Work: Why Enterprise Usage Is Outshining Consumer Usage," IoT Agenda, March 8, 2018; Josh Garrett, "Wearables: The Next Wave of Enterprise IoT?" IoT Agenda, February 1, 2018; and Lucas Mearian, "IS Google Glass Really Ready for the Enterprise?" Computerworld, August 1, 2017 CASE STUDY QUESTIONS 1. Wearables have the potential to change the way or- ganizations and workers conduct business. Discuss the implications of this statement. 2. What management, organization, and technology issues would have to be addressed if a company was thinking of equipping its workers with a wearable computing device? 3. What kinds of businesses are most likely to benefit from wearable computers? Select a business and describe how a wearable computing device could help that business improve operations or decision making