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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.
What is cloud computing?
Wearable tech
Did Apple's CEO dis Google Glass?
Wearable tech tracks your life
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.
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