Reader Forum: Businesses get it – nobody wants to be a 'glasshole'

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If you want to understand the future of wearable technology, and the implications for corporate IT, don’t hang around Google Glass developer conferences.
Instead, go to Disneyworld, where visitors gladly wear colorful smart “Magic Bands” that let them do everything from unlock their hotel rooms to get into rides and buy food. Visitors get the convenience of traveling more lightly, while Disney gets up to the minute information on everything from the length of the lines at Space Mountain to how well vanilla shakes are selling at Epcot.
Or go to the Vail ski resort, where I was recently, and check out their EpicMix program, in which visitors wear an RF-equipped pass that tracks the vertical feet they’ve skied, earn pins for tackling various challenges and race against their friends.
The three critical takeaways from these examples: Wearable technology can’t be clunky; 2) it has to offer an apparent and immediate benefit; and rather than one general-purpose device like Google Glass, it will take the form of multiple, single-purpose devices like smart wristbands.
We’re already seeing this trend with consumer products such as the Fitbit exercise tracker and Coin, which consolidates all your credit cards into one device. Again, all these deliver immediate and obvious value, serve a single purpose, and don’t make you look like a geek.
Here are some of the potential sweet spots I see for commercial wearable technology:
Healthcare: Expect to see more monitors that measure and store data such as heart rates, blood pressure and even blood glucose for transmission to health care providers. Expect also to see more creative uses of this information by health care providers and insurers. Consider, for example, a company asking all its employees to wear such a device for a week to prove how many are exercising and thus get a better group rate. This is the health equivalent of a device you plug into your car to prove your safe driving habits and get a break on your car insurance.
Retail: Imagine a smart version of the wristbands that today just identify you at a concert or when you check into a hospital. A retailer might ask you to wear such a wristband in return for a discount on your purchases, along with perhaps automatic checkout. In return, the store can track where you spent the most time, what products you lingered in front of and which displays captured your attention. With information like that, marketers can understand how to move customers away from loss leaders to more profitable items.
Industrial: On the manufacturing side, we already see the use of RFID tags to track inventory and components as they move through the production line and out to stores. Imagine smart wristbands or toughened smart watches that can monitor conditions in dirty or dangerous environments. Such devices could also allow production workers to report problems and get real-time updates on inventory in work areas where it’s impossible to use a PC or tablet.
Smartwatches: There’s a great opportunity here for companies to create attractive and even elegant devices consumers will want to wear. The tangible value will come, for example, by using them to access location-specific information without pulling out a smartphone, or from buying goods and services without carrying around a wallet.
IT organizations can help their organizations pioneer such services by learning about the capabilities and technologies powering these single-use wearable devices, with special attention on the APIs required to link them to legacy corporate systems. Their even more important homework is to start thinking about the management and security implications of such devices.