When you're as big as the Tata Group (and if you don't know about the company, you should read up on it), you can develop hardware products just for your own internal use. That's apparently what the company is doing with a piece of wristware building a safety watch for workers in several of its subsidiaries. The Economic Times of India reports that Tata CIO Gopichand … [Read more...]
Noonee Chairless Chair Exoskeleton Lets You Sit Anywhere
The Swiss startup Noonee is building a device that straps onto your legs and shoes, and lets you sit down anywhere you want. The company pitches it as a "posture support device," which has a nice ring to it. The thing is a five-pound carbon fiber and aluminum device that you put behind your legs; it's jointed at the knees and has pads at the buttocks. You can assume whatever … [Read more...]
Do Wearables Make You More Productive or Just More Trackable?
CNN's got a pretty good thumbsucker (journalistic lingo for a long analytical article with no noticeable news hook) about wearables: what they mean for personal and industrial productivity and what the privacy implications might be. The author, Dr. Chris Brauer, a lecturer at the University of London, did some interesting research on a panel of users, and reported that 68 … [Read more...]
Wearables in the Harvard Business Review
Beth Comstock, the way-smart CMO at GE, points out a good article from the Harvard Business Review about the use of wearable technology in business. Although it starts with the thorough instrumentation of professional athletes in training, the article explicitly raises the specter of Frederick Taylor's pioneering (though later questioned) time-motion studies done at Western … [Read more...]