UNIVERSITY OF GHANA

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BAHS211: COMPUTER APPLICATIONS
CASE STUDY
Is Business/Health industry Ready for Wearable Computers?
Wearable computing is starting to take off. Smartwatches, smart glasses, smart ID badges, and
activity trackers promise to change how we go about each day and the way we do our jobs.
According to Gartner Inc., sales of wearables will increase from 275 million units in 2016 to 477
million units by 2020. Although smartwatches such as the Apple Watch and fitness trackers have
been successful consumer products, business uses for wearables appear to be advancing more
rapidly. A report from research firm Tractica projects that worldwide sales for enterprise wearables
will increase exponentially to 66.4 million units by 2021.
Doctors and nurses are using smart eyewear for hands-free access to patients’ medical records. Oil
rig workers sport smart helmets to connect with land-based experts, who can view their work
remotely and communicate instructions. Warehouse managers are able to capture real-time
performance data using a smartwatch to better manage distribution and fulfillment operations.
Wearable computing devices improve productivity by delivering information to workers without
requiring them to interrupt their tasks, which in turn empowers employees to make more-informed
decisions more quickly. Wearable devices are helping businesses learn more about employees and
the everyday workplace than ever before. New insights and information can be uncovered as IoT
sensor data is correlated to actual human behavior. 2
Information on task duration and the proximity of one device or employee to another, when
combined with demographic data, can shed light on previously unidentified workflow inefficiencies.
Technologically sophisticated firms will understand things they never could before about workers
and customers; what they do every day, how healthy they are, where they go, and even how well they
feel. This obviously has implications for protecting individual privacy, raising potential employee
(and customer) fears that businesses are collecting sensitive data about them. Businesses will need to
tread carefully. Global logistics company DHL worked with Ricoh, the imaging and electronics
company, and Ubimax, a wearable computing services and solutions company, to implement “vision
picking” in its warehouse operations. Location graphics are displayed on smart glasses guiding
staffers through the warehouse to both speed the process of finding items and reduce errors.
The company says the technology delivered a 25 percent increase in efficiency. Vision picking gives
workers locational information about the items they need to retrieve and allows them to
automatically scan retrieved items. Future enhancements will enable the system to plot optimal
routes through the warehouse, provide pictures of items to be retrieved (a key aid in case an item has
been misplaced on the warehouse shelves), and instruct workers on loading carts and pallets more
efficiently. Google has developed Glass Enterprise Edition smart glasses for business use, with its
development partners creating applications for specific industries such as manufacturing and
healthcare. Glass Enterprise Edition is being touted as a tool for easing workflows by removing
distractions that prevent employees from remaining engaged and focused on tasks. More than 50
businesses including Dignity Health, The Boeing Company, and Volkswagen have been using Glass
to complete their work more rapidly and efficiently. 3
Duke Energy has been piloting the use of smart glasses, and sees multiple uses for them. According
to Aleksandar Vukojevic, technology development manager for Duke Energy’s Emerging
Technologies Office, smart glasses can enable employees working in the field to access training or
instructional videos to help with equipment repairs or upgrades. The glasses also allow remote
management, enabling managers to capture what a line or transformer worker sees, annotate images
and video with instructions, and send them back out to workers in the field. Duke also tried out the
smart glasses in its warehouses for stock inventory. As a worker looks at an item code, it’s
automatically recorded against an existing database. There are some challenges. Locking down data
that’s accessed with smart glasses is essential, as with any other mobile device used in the enterprise.
Today’s smart glasses haven’t been designed with security in mind. The sensors in the smart glasses
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 solution
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
applications, 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 effectiveness but on the 4
development of new and better apps and integration with existing IT infrastructure and the
organization’s tools for managing and securing mobile devices.
Questions
Wearables have the potential to change the way organizations and workers conduct business. Discuss
the implications of this statement.