Elite sportsmen have pioneered the use of wearable technology since the idea was little more than glint in the eye of some Google product managers.
In the English Premier League, for example, players wear monitors in training that check everything from fitness to their best position to how close they are to getting injured, with the Viper Pod – a strangely bra-like construction that includes GPS, 3-D accelerometer, gyroscope, 3-D digital compass and a heart rate monitor – one of the weapons of choice.
For top athletes, who live in a world where even the slightest improvement in performance can reap considerable rewards, these hi-tech monitoring systems makes a lot of sense. They may be expensive but – especially in the moneyed world of the Premier League – it is an investment that can pay off tenfold, even if they only raise performance a fraction above the norm.
And now it seems the practice is spreading to the less glamorous (if equally lucrative) world of finance, with a recent report claiming that City workers are using wearable technology to track heart rates and hormone levels.
Bloomberg reported this week that, “Across the UK, hedge funds, banks, call centres and consultancies are installing tracking systems to link biosensing wearable devices with analytics tools once the preserve of elite sports.”
“Yes, it’s already happening, starting off with some of the big hedge funds.” John Coates, a Cambridge neuroscientist and former Goldman Sachs trader who is working with companies to link biological signals to trading success, told Bloomberg.
The specifics of what City firms are doing with wearable technology are bound up in Non-Disclosure Agreements and walls of silence, with companies wary of giving their rivals access to information that could give them a competitive edge.
But Coates tells Bloomberg he is working on an “early warning system” that, by monitoring hormones in traders, can tell when they may be predisposed to taking unacceptable risks.
“A lot of smart managers think their algos have gone as far as they can go,” Coates adds. “The next step is human optimisation.”
“Human optimisation” is the kind of Brave New World-esque phrase designed to throw fear into the heart of even the most tech-friendly of punters.
And, certainly, these practices do raise a lot of tricky questions. Can human behaviour be reduced to the outcome of observable physical signs? Are we really little more than a series of hormones, heart rates and responses? What about personality? Intelligence? Experience?
Then there are the ethical questions: City traders may not be the easiest characters to sympathise with but they deserve their privacy like anyone else. Using wearable technology to check stress levels at work is a fairly serious invasion of their privacy and it is easy to imagine a scenario where the wrong vital signs could lead to a trader being made redundant or shunted out to another job.
Where, you might also ask, does this stop? If you can wire up a trader at work to check his stress levels, then what is to stop you extending this to his home life? And do you stop at measuring stress? How about units of alcohol consumed? Calories eaten?
You could argue that City traders – like top footballers – earn enough money to wash away these fears, that they gave up their rights to normal lives when they earned their first million pound pay cheques. (A slightly harsh view, perhaps, but one that definitely exists).
But what about the rest of us? Could we – the Joe Average office workers – face the same moral dilemmas one day? Could our bosses kit us out with heart monitors as we go about our daily photocopying?
It might seem outlandish. But there are several reasons why this idea may not be as farfetched as it sounds.
Firstly, wearable technology itself is on the rise: IHS recently predicted that by 2019 the worldwide market for health sensors will be around 466m units.
The vast majority of this, it is true, will be for personal use – Fitbits for joggers and Apple Watches for tech freaks. But the more we get used to wearing trackers, sensors etc, the more normal they will seem and the more prepared we will be to let them enter our working lives.
After all, not so long ago many people refused to have a mobile phone, thinking they would intrude on their privacy. Now this argument seems incredibly arcane, even as mobile phones have evolved to a level of complexity that enables them to track our every move.
Accompanying this is the growing use of wearable technology in the workplace (something we have covered on this blog before). This, for the moment, is far less ambitious, ubiquitous and intrusive than the use of smart fitness trackers for footballers and City traders.
But as companies start to equip staff with Apple Watches, Google Glass etc – as they almost certainly will, with a recent study from Samsung and PwC finding that 77% of respondents “saw benefits in wearable devices for boosting efficiency and productivity at work” – then the idea of using similar devices, or even the same ones, to monitor employee health will sound a lot more acceptable.
Underlying all this are the falling price points and increasing availability of wearable technology devices, driven by the launch of consumer-facing products such as the Apple Watch and the Pebble.
Premiership football teams and City trading firms earn millions of pounds from the actions of their employees. As a result, they can afford to fork out thousands of pounds for tracking technology
As technology prices fall, though, it will become financially viable for firms to fit workers with tracking devices, even if they only save a couple of hundred pounds a year. And “financially viable” are among most bosses’ favourite words.
That is not to say we will all be wearing tracking technology at work in 2016. In many cases unions won’t allow it and there will be some jobs such technology simply isn’t suited for.
But the practice is likely to become a lot more ubiquitous over the coming years, as we all get used to wearable technology and the benefits it can bring. One day, in fact, putting on the work heart sensor could be as normal as checking the work phone first thing in the morning for emails.
Many people won’t like it. But the likelihood is that the majority of workers won’t really care.
Although it is almost certainly time to think of a less scary phrase than “human optimisation”.