Wearable Technology: The True Face of the IoT

Wearable tech is the first and most intimate way that most consumers are going to intersect with the IoT, at least at the beginning. A smart watch, fitness tracker or smart shoe has the potential to make the IoT real for consumers in a way that they care about, all the time, in real life. Smart grid will never do that.

Igor Kozhurenko, Product Strategist at DataArt, a technology services consultancy, says that this fact explains why the wearable market keeps growing year over year, and why it’s important to understand how device data can be used in real applications.

“The real question is how to build devices so they are useful to users,” he said. “You have to aggregate all forms of collected data and manage existing data to create actionable intelligence.”

The first major answer to that question is to settle the issue of data ownership. He said that the privacy policies of companies that collect data have to be built in such a way that privacy protections are built in, and enforceable.

It’s not just about personal data protections, either. “The company that collects the data – the data warehouse – must be protected through many different security layers,” he said. But, there has to be access for the right uses, too. “If you let application developers use the data that comes in from the sensors, solutions can be created from aggregated data to help end users be more effective in life.”

At the enterprise level, wearables aren’t always considered first, but they will have a role to play there, too, he said. “Wearable tech can drastically improve processes through creating proprietary solutions for specific organizations’ needs,” he said. “Employees with custom wearable solutions could take advantages of timely notifications of potential problems, take action and avoid losses or other mishaps.”

Wait until wearables go from the toys of the well-to-do and well-connected to the survival necessity of the average person – then you’ll see how valuable the data turns out to be.

For more about wearables, make sure you register right away for the Wearable tech Expo, July 13 to 15 at the Jacob Javits Center in New York City. Also, take a look at the IoT Evolution Expo this August in Las Vegas for a comprehensive deep dive into the larger IoT. See you there.