How your work performance can be monitored as easily as your health: the future of wearable tech?

Your Apple Watch or Fitbit measures general health and fitness, but researchers used wearables to monitor workers’ sleep, stress, phone use and calorie intake

They discovered the habits that separate high performers from low performers. Good news, you may think, but what if your boss could use such data against you?

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Not only does it keep you fit, wearable tech could also be used to track your performance at work. Photo: Alamy

Published: 7:45am, 3 Jul 2019Updated: 7:34pm, 4 Jul 2019

The rise of wearable devices like the Apple Watch and Fitbit offer us the ability to turn our daily lives into an never-ending catalogue of interpretable data: tracking how many steps we take, the number of calories we consume, our REM sleep cycles, and even the health of our hearts.

Now a team of researchers at Dartmouth College, a university in the US state of New Hampshire, say those wearables can serve another purpose: determining whether you’re a productive employee. The data-obsessed may be quick to embrace such an assessment, but what if an employer has access to that information as well?

The researchers say their mobile sensing system, which consists of fitness bracelets, sensors and a custom app, can measure employee performance with about 80 per cent accuracy.

The system monitors physical and emotional signals that employees produce during the day and uses that data to create a performance profile over time that is designed to eliminate bias from evaluations. The technology may be in its infancy, researchers say, but it could signal the beginning of a new era of virtual assistants that will redefine our relationships with intelligent machines.

Joaquin Phoenix in a still from Her (2013).

Someday, they hope their technology might function like “Samantha”, the artificially intelligent assistant in the 2013 movie Her (minus the unhealthy romance), providing someone with valuable insights about their productivity, stress levels during meetings, or lifestyle habits.