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Workforce superpowers

by David Schatsky, Navya Kumar
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25 July 2018

Workforce superpowers Wearables are augmenting employees’ abilities

25 July 2018
  • David Schatsky United States
  • Navya Kumar United States
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  • Signals
  • New world of work, new technologies
  • The digitally enhanced workforce
  • Implications for enterprises

Wearable technology can augment workers’ physical and perceptual abilities and help keep them safe. It’s time for companies to assess the potential of this technology and consider its impact on workforce planning.

It’s not only pessimistic sci-fi authors who have long envisioned a jobless future—plenty of analysts worry that robots may someday make human workers obsolete.1 But this overlooks a crucial trend: Technology is already making workers more valuable by enhancing their physical and perceptual abilities. A new generation of wearable technologies is giving workers superhuman strength, endurance, vision, hearing, and awareness. Wearables are enhancing workers’ effectiveness and productivity and helping to keep people safe. Far from making workers obsolete, these technologies can improve their productivity, help them overcome physical limitations, or compensate for spotty skills. And they give employers new ways to plan for the workforce of the future.

Signals

  • Older workers are participating in the workforce in greater numbers: By 2026, 37 percent of those aged 65 to 69 years will be actively employed, versus 22 percent in 19962
  • Annual workplace injury costs have reached almost US$60 billion in the United States3
  • Enterprises in the automotive, chemicals and materials, mining, and oil and gas industries are using wearables to improve worker safety while enhancing the quality and efficiency of their work
  • Wearables are also driving workplace productivity and well-being in nonindustrial settings such as health care, retail, travel, financial services, and real estate
  • Leading technology and industrial products companies offer a range of wearable workforce solutions
  • Venture capital investment in wearables startups totals around US$6 billion since 20144
  • The global market for enterprise wearables—including smart watches, smart glasses, hearables, and exoskeletons—is expected to grow 41 percent annually to exceed US$60 billion in 20225

New world of work, new technologies

Learn More

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The impact of technology on work has always been double-sided. Some technologies have eliminated jobs and displaced workers; others have made workers more productive. Making workers more productive and more capable is the promise of wearable technologies. Early signs suggest that wearables could have a significant impact on the workforce and the companies that employ them.

It’s particularly important to understand how this plays out at a time of rapid technological change and one in which the workforce is changing in important ways. For instance, in developed economies, the workforce is aging,6 employers face shortages of employees with desired skills,7 remote working is on the rise,8 and regulators are carefully scrutinizing workplace safety.9

Wearable technologies such as smart watches, smart glasses, hearables, and exoskeletons can help company leaders navigate these challenges by augmenting workers’ physical and perceptual capabilities, amplifying their physical strength, lucidly conveying detailed task instructions as needed, facilitating virtual interactions, and alerting for hazards. All of this has the potential to significantly boost productivity10 and safety.

Advances in enabling technologies are propelling the market for wearables

Advancements in technologies such as robotics, the Internet of Things (IoT), and augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR) are driving enterprise adoption of wearables by improving their viability and utility: The hardware, including sensor modules, smart glasses, and exosuits, is getting smaller, lighter, and more affordable. Crucially, newer hardware is also offering longer battery life. A growing ability to capture and process complex data in real time, including voice and gestures, is making wearables easier to use. And vendor offerings of wearables-as-a-service and as end-to-end solutions are making them easier for enterprises to adopt.11

The digitally enhanced workforce

Various forms of wearables are finding use in diverse settings, from manufacturing and construction sites to research labs and offices. This can bring benefits to workers and their employers in several ways.

Enhancing strength and endurance

Some businesses that employ physical labor are equipping their workers with exoskeletons that aim to support the body, helping employees conserve energy and avoid strain—for instance, they can also transfer the weight of heavy loads to the ground or to different muscles to boost strength and endurance. This is particularly useful in the context of an aging workforce.

At Ford, exoskeletons enable manufacturing workers—some over 50 years old—to engage in prolonged efforts with less fatigue.12 And at Lowe’s hardware stores, exoskeletons help workers easily lift heavy objects.13

Because they provide muscle support, exoskeletons can help workers avoid overexertion—the leading cause of disabling workplace injuries, accounting for nearly US$14 billion in annual compensation costs for businesses.14 Organizations such as automaker Audi,15 construction company Gammon,16 and the US Navy17 are evaluating or using exoskeletons.

Augmenting vision

Augmented and virtual reality can amplify workers’ powers of perception. As we have written elsewhere, a growing number of businesses are finding applications for these technologies to guide workflow, collaboration, and productivity.18

Overlaying contextually relevant information such as instructions and explanations in a worker’s field of view can enable him or her to work faster and with better quality. For example, at GE Aviation, smart glasses ensure that mechanics need not stop work to check reference manuals, thus improving efficiency by 8 to 12 percent while reducing errors, potentially saving millions.19

Rich visualization capabilities afforded by wearable AR or VR devices can augment staffers’ design and data analysis abilities. For instance, Pfizer’s researchers can absorb complex data about protein structures more quickly by virtually stepping inside molecules, studying them up close and from every angle.20

AR can also make collaboration more cost-effective by giving people the ability to see remote activities in real time. While repairing equipment at bottling plants, Coca-Cola technicians use smart glasses to share their visuals with remotely located experts for advice;21 this reduces delays and costs involved in flying in those specialists to the site.

Empowering speech and hearing voice

Connected hearables and voice-controlled wearables can bring instant, hands-free access to instructions and other information with the intuitive ease of speech. This can not only empower less skilled workers but increase efficiency by making workers more productive.

For instance, at Lufthansa, voice-based headphones enable a single technician to accomplish the maintenance work that earlier required two. Previously, in teams of two, one person would read out instructions, while another would execute them and report status, which the first would then write down. With the wearable, the maintenance checklist gets converted to voice commands conveyed to a technician’s headphones; the technician then executes the tasks and speaks out the status, with that speech automatically converted into data and stored.22

Voice wearables can also transform customer service. At Air New Zealand, with wireless headphones connected to machine learning–enabled live translation capabilities on a smartphone, staff can understand customers speaking in any of 40 languages.23

Improving awareness

Connected wearables can provide quick task and situational awareness to workers to increase their productivity and work quality. At Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, smart watches alert cleaning crews when and where they are needed. Dynamic task scheduling produces cleaner facilities than fixed rounds did, resulting in better traveler experience.24

Wearables can help improve worker safety as well by monitoring the wearer’s physical status and environmental conditions and raising alerts when conditions become dangerous. At a Fujitsu factory, smart wristwear issues alerts at signs of heat stress,25 while at a mining company, smart helmets detect driver fatigue. There is significant economic potential here: US businesses spend nearly US$1 billion per week compensating for workplace injuries.26

Corporate wellness programs may be able to improve staff health and reduce health care costs by introducing such devices as data-driven motivators. For instance, with Fitbit, the Dayton Regional Transit Authority helped employees improve glucose and cholesterol levels while saving more than US$2 million in health care costs.27 One projection sees 90 percent of enterprise wellness initiatives including fitness trackers by 2021.28

Implications for enterprises

In augmenting human physical and sensory capabilities, wearables may change the game for organizations that struggle with skill shortages or aging workers and yet find full automation infeasible due to high costs, process complexity, or simply the fact that some work is best done by people rather than robots.29 By supporting workers and embodying skills and abilities they may lack, wearables can expand the labor pool available to employers and reduce the time required to train workers for new tasks.

Effective deployment of wearables requires technology leaders to work alongside operations leaders to integrate the new tools into existing enterprise technology systems; some workflow procedures will no doubt need to be tweaked to incorporate employees’ new capabilities—for instance, aiming to digitize maintenance steps so they can be displayed over smart glasses or read over smart hearables. Additionally, organizations face cybersecurity and governance concerns related to wearable data transmission and storage. Depending on how wearable data is used, it may be considered protected health information under HIPAA regulations.30

Change management programs to support the deployment of wearables in the workforce should include more than training—they may need to anticipate and address employee concerns over privacy and data usage: According to a recent UK study, many workers are concerned about surveillance through wearables or “Big Brother watching.”31 And plenty fear workplace discrimination based on health data captured from wearables.32 This suggests that leaders may need to clarify to workers how employers intend to use wearables—and how personal data will be protected. It’s more likely that people will be enthusiastic if they understand how anonymized and aggregated data from wearables can inform work design, staffing, and other decisions to the benefit of employees as well as the organization.

Wearables in your workplace

In the coming months and years, we’ll likely see wearables take even more forms and combine a wider range of emerging technologies. For now, their core utility remains to ensure the safety and augment the capabilities of workers. They are gaining traction. In manufacturing alone, half of 1,100 recently surveyed global enterprises plan to deploy these technologies by 2022.33 It’s time for companies not already utilizing wearables to assess their potential and to rethink workforce planning in light of the impact these technologies can have. After all, what employer wouldn’t want a workforce with superpowers?

Authors

David Schatsky is a managing director at Deloitte LLP. He is based in New York . 

 

Navya Kumar works with Deloitte Services India Pvt. Ltd. She is based in Mumbai.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Yang Chu of Deloitte & Touche LLP and Aniket Dongre of Deloitte Support Services India Pvt Ltd.

 

Cover art by: Molly Woodworth

Endnotes
    1. PBS NewsHour, “Are we on the brink of a jobless future?,” August 31, 2017. View in article

    2. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Civilian labor force participation rate, by age, sex, race, and ethnicity,” October 24, 2017. View in article

    3. Connecticut Business & Industry Association, “Workplace injuries cost U.S. companies over $1 billion per week,” May 8, 2018. View in article

    4. Deloitte analysis of CB Insights data. View in article

    5. Deloitte analysis of ABI Research data; on enterprise wearables, see ABI Research, “ABI Research forecasts enterprise wearables will top US$60 billion in revenue in 2022,” August 10, 2017; on exoskeletons, see Andrei Khalip, “Exoskeletons explained,” Reuters, October 27, 2017. View in article

    6. Patricia Buckley and Daniel Bachman, “Meet the US workforce of the future: Older, more diverse, and more educated,” Deloitte Review 21, July 31, 2017; Briony Harris, “The job market is booming for older workers,” World Economic Forum, November 27, 2017. View in article

    7. Daniel Flatley, “Firms under pressure as labor drought grows, U.S. survey shows,” Bloomberg, July 17, 2017. View in article

    8. Niraj Chokshi, “Out of the office: More people are working remotely, survey finds,” New York Times, February 15, 2017. View in article

    9. Steve Morton, Barry M. Hartman, and William J. Moltz, “Upping the ante: DOJ prosecuting OSHA cases as environmental crimes,” K&L Gates, November 18, 2016. View in article

    10. Jobsite News, “Can wearables be used to improve workplace productivity?,” July 19, 2017. View in article

    11. Fujitsu, It is 2018 and too many workers are retiring early due to work related injuries—how can we address this?, 2018; Cision, “Trakopolis and Honeywell expand exclusive ‘IoT’ partnership for connected worker solution,” April 11, 2017. View in article

    12. James Gilboy, “Ford is equipping Valencia factory workers with exoskeletons,” Drive, February 7, 2018. View in article

    13. James Vincent, “Lowe’s prototype exoskeletons give warehouse workers a boost,” Verge, May 15, 2017. View in article

    14. Liberty Mutual Insurance, Liberty Mutual workplace safety index: Risk control from Liberty Mutual insurance, 2018. View in article

    15. Chris Bruce, “Audi exoskeleton makes workers bionic, could reduce back injuries,” Motor1.com, December 19, 2017. View in article

    16. Panasonic, “Panasonic’s power assist suit enters joint development of construction technology in Hong Kong,” November 29, 2017. View in article

    17. Lockheed Martin, “FORTIS demonstrates productivity and safety improvements at U.S. Navy shipyard,” Cision, February 23, 2017. View in article

    18. Ryan Kaiser and David Schatsky, For more companies, new ways of seeing, Deloitte University Press, April 5, 2017. View in article

    19. Stephanie Condon, “Why GE’s use of Google Glass marks a turning point for AR,” ZDNet, August 14, 2017. View in article

    20. Kevin Hallock, “The voice of experience,” Compass, accessed July 11, 2018. View in article

    21. Jay Moye, “Coca-Cola testing augmented reality for bottling equipment maintenance and more,” Coca-Cola, May 5, 2017. View in article

    22. Honeywell, Lufthansa Technik AG: Honeywell Vocollect voice solution for maintenance and inspection transforms APU services at Lufthansa Technik AG, 2015. View in article

    23. Air New Zealand, “Air New Zealand explores translation technology,” accessed July 19, 2018. View in article

    24. Samsung Insights, “Cincinnati airport enhances the customer experience with wearable alert solution,” accessed July 18, 2018. View in article

    25. Fujitsu, “Fujitsu estimates workers’ heat stress levels with new AI-based algorithm,” July 12, 2017. View in article

    26. Liberty Mutual Insurance, “Liberty Mutual workplace safety index.” View in article

    27. Fitbit, RTA takes a stand against sitting, accessed July 11, 2018. View in article

    28. Christy Pettey, “Wearables hold the key to connected health monitoring,” Gartner, March 8, 2018. View in article

    29. John Lippert, “Robots rejected: Humans still build the best new car you can buy,” Bloomberg, January 23, 2018. View in article

    30. Elizabeth Snell, “How do HIPAA regulations apply to wearable devices?,” HealthIT Security, March 23, 2017. View in article

    31. Lilli Hender, “Surveillance, safety and stress: Concerns over ‘big brother’ wearables,” Office Genie, June 6, 2017. View in article

    32. International Travel & Health Insurance Journal, “AXA releases health tech survey data,” February 13, 2018. View in article

    33. Zebra Technologies Corp., “Zebra study reveals one-half of manufacturers globally to adopt wearable tech by 2022,” press release, July 31, 2017. View in article

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David Schatsky

David Schatsky

Managing Director | Deloitte LLP

David analyzes emerging technology and business trends for Deloitte’s leaders and clients. His recent published works include Signals for Strategists: Sensing Emerging Trends in Business and Technology (Rosetta Books 2015), “Demystifying artificial intelligence: What business leaders need to know about cognitive technologies,” and “Cognitive technologies: The real opportunities for business” (Deloitte Insights 2014-15). Before joining Deloitte, David led two research and advisory firms.

  • dschatsky@deloitte.com
Navya Kumar

Navya Kumar

Associate | Deloitte Services India Pvt. Ltd

Navya works with Deloitte Services India Pvt. Ltd., tracking and analyzing emerging technology and business trends, with a primary focus on enterprise digital transformation and the Internet of Things. She has written on macroeconomic themes and worked in life sciences business research.

  • kunavya@deloitte.com
  • +91 9820 246 274

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