Wearable Technology: The Right Move for Your Organization?

By Aleya Harris

In the meantime, there's plenty of evidence that wearable tech can provide significant benefits to your organization—especially from the perspective of facilities management.

What Are Wearables?

The defining characteristic of wearables is right in the name. They're smart devices that employees can wear, such as watches, tags, glasses, or even jewelry and stickers. A common feature is their ability to gather and communicate information passively, through chips and sensors.

Every organization has its own set of tasks and processes that might be improved by using wearables, but as with any technology still in its early stages, it's not always obvious where it might best be deployed.

3 Business Uses of Wearables

Here are three areas of business operations where your team might find potential for wearable technology.

1. Access and Time Tracking

Employee ID badges get lost. Timesheets get filled out with inaccurate information. Wearables can tackle both problems at once, seamlessly granting access without requiring the use of a single-purpose badge; while recording clock-ins and clock-outs automatically.

By reading biometrics, or detecting proximity to other wearables or IOT devices, smarter wearables could even assign the correct payroll codes to the work an employee is doing, even if no change of location is involved.

2. Safety

Wearables could literally save the lives of workers who engage in hazardous job tasks. Wearables can read heart rates and other vital signs to detect signs of injury or fatigue; send out alerts based on dangerous environmental data; and monitor for anomalous activity that might indicate an accident, like a sudden drop in travel speed or elevation.

3. Communication

In addition to the ways that wearables can automatically receive and transmit information, voice-activated commands can make communicating directly with a coworker or supervisor effortless.

Buildings designed around the uses of wearables will be able to provide even more information—imagine giving a maintenance worker a pair of augmented reality glasses that gives them “x-ray vision” to “see” things like pipes and wiring inside the walls.

Weighing the Costs & Benefits

Many facilities managers are taking a slow drip approach to introducing wearable technology, starting with simple devices with immediately obvious benefits and gradually integrating them into the organization.

As with any new technology, it's not always apparent how they will actually improve business operations in a way that will increase revenue. It's important to determine what tangible benefits you expect any new wearable to provide, and to follow up after rollout to see if it's being used properly and working as intended.  

With so many potential uses, it's likely that some type of wearable could be a great fit for your organization.