FITNESS TRACKERS ARE UPPING THEIR GAME WITH ADDITIONAL SMART CAPABILITIES
Sleep patterns, nutrition and even stress levels can be monitored through the devices. Companies are taking note, says Suzanne Locke
More than 100 million wearable fitness-tracking devices were shipped worldwide last year – and wearables are going way beyond steps and sleep today, to measure heart rates, stress levels and even posture.
Yet corporate programmes tend to stick to measuring employees’ steps. Trackers are becoming big business. The seed fund Rock Health estimates that 102 million wearable devices were shipped worldwide last year.
The technology analysts Juniper Research predict that at least 13 million devices will be integrated into wellness programmes by 2018, while Gartner suggest that 70 per cent of multinational corporations will sponsor the use of such devices this year.
But it would seem the experimentation, beyond standard trackers such as the Fitbit, Garmin and Samsung Gear, is left to the consumer market, while businesses rely on measuring steps to encourage a more active lifestyle.
Data has to be “really credible” before an employer can be assured it will work for their staff, says Jaya Maru, the co-founder of corporate wellness and rewards platform Flabuless, which is rebranding in the UAE as Rewardz to match its parent company in Singapore. Because of that, it is left to the consumer market to validate new devices and measurements, she says.
It is “early days” for the corporate well-being tracker market, she adds, and “employers have to be very careful”.
“It is incomplete to measure well-being without elements like sleep, stress and nutrition; however, at an enterprise level, the technology is still not there to make this level of tracking at a reasonably fair level, where you are confident it will not create a backlash among employees,” Ms Maru adds.
“The closest we have seen is assigning a consolidated, more holistic well-being score, based on a combination of movement tracked, sleep logs, nutritional information and stress-related questionnaires. Communicating particular data points like stress or posture could be very debatable.”
Zara Martirosyan, the Dubaibased founder and chief executive of the inKin social fitness
InKin plans to add mood logging such as blood pressure, sugar intake and weight
platform, says that simple corporate wellness challenges “do work”. Based on data from more than 100 programmes run on inKin, the average increase in daily steps has soared by 30 per cent, she says, and the number of employees hitting the recommended 10,000 daily steps target has jumped from 12 per cent to 41 per cent.
InKin planns to add mood logging such as blood pressure, sugar intake and weight that can be tracked via staff’s fitness devices and aggregated on the platform, she says.
One client, an international energy company, specifically asked for staff sleep patterns to be monitored after an incident where a sleep-deprived employee fell asleep at the wheel and died in a car accident. Ms Maru says Rewardz also attracts “a lot of interest” from clients to measure sleep.
But she says any tracking needs to be automatic. “If you have to log, people will do it for a week or two then lose interest. This is why it is impossible to track how healthily employees are eating – tracking nutrition is still manual. Even the best apps are populated with 10,000 different kinds of food and calculate portion sizes and calories. They are not at the level where you can scan food and it will tell you how many calories it has.”
PwC ran a survey of UK workers in 2014 and reported that 65 per cent did want their employer to use technology to take an active role in their health and well-being. Half claimed they would wear a smartwatch in the workplace to help their well-being – but almost four out of 10 said they did not trust their employer not to use the data.
“The big question to address is how to deal with data privacy,” says Ms Maru. “It has to be aggregate, not individual, data. One person said it was against their personal values, that their movements should not be tracked by their organisation.”