Editor’s note: Huw Davies is the qualitative services manager at U.K.-based market research firm Gillian Kenny Associates.
Picture the scene. You wake in the morning and check your mobile device to see how well you slept. You slip on your smartwatch, which starts to monitor your heart rate, and your smartshirt, which senses your breathing. You leave for work, sliding on your smartglasses in the hallway before stepping out into the world fully connected to the Internet.
It might sound like science fiction yet all these products are being used by consumers right now. Sewn into our clothes, worn as accessories or anchored through our smartphones, wearable technologies are rapidly turning each of us into a walking, talking data creator.
The market in wearables is set to explode, with experts estimating a surge from the prototype/early adopter phase to a full-blown global market worth nearly $6 billion by 2018. In preparation for this imminent expansion, many businesses are exploring the potential applications for the new technologies, with health and health care leading the field.
Many of the benefits of wearing sensors to monitor our health are self-evident: blood pressure measurements to predict heart attacks; sweat analysis to eliminate blood tests; and blood glucose monitoring to aid diabetics, to name three. What’s more, head-mounted displays like Google Glass will free us from our mobile devices and allow us to interact with the world in new and interesting ways. (While Google announced this month that it was scaling back its plans for Glass, one has to imagine the technology will resurface in some form in the near future.)
With more people voluntarily wearing data collection devices, the possibilities have not escaped the eagle eyes of market researchers. In the consumer arena, agencies have been quick to explore the possibilities of participants wearing a Google Glass-like machine for research purposes, for example. Yet, how prepared are health care market research agencies to make the most of these new and exciting technologies?
A world of possibilities
Wearable technology is a broad term and covers many types of devices so it is helpful to place them in categories, starting with media capture devices.
Smartglasses, head-mounted displays or GoPro-like cameras worn by a subject have the potential to radically alter the way researchers collect real-world data. Mobile devices have already started to revolutionize the way we do qualitative research by helping respondents capture the world around them as they go about their daily lives, recording video or audio diaries or participating in research tasks. As we increasingly integrate smart wearables into our lives, the ability to capture in-the-moment, in-depth data in an unobtrusive way reaches a new level.
Yet it is with ethnographic research, perhaps, that the greatest rewards may lie. Wearables remove the need for a researcher to be physically present. For example, always-on, head-mounted displays that send a live stream of video and audio could transform the way we understand both the behavior of patients and health care practitioners. In health care market research, smart wearables have the potential to give companies far greater insight into how a patient uses a device, their attitude to their medication or how a doctor reaches a diagnosis.
Wearable sensors that measure a wearer’s vital signs and activity levels could revolutionize our health and our health care. Firmly in the big data camp, such devices will create huge quantities of data that, once fed into software apps, will create detailed pictures of the wearer’s health and fitness. Big companies, including Google, are already offering cutting-edge and highly innovative ways for patients to engage with their own health. Google is already testing a new tool that will allow people using its search engine to engage in a live video chat with a doctor to discuss potential health problems.
Individually, wearable technologies have countless applications and, in combination, the possibilities of wearable devices in health care market research explode. Without a crystal ball it’s impossible to be sure what will happen. Will wearable tech become as popular as smartphones? If so, would it then be possible to do large-scale quantitative studies? Can we handle the data?
Wearable technologies are not without their detractors. For every person who sees a brave new world of better health and greater engagement with the Internet of Things, there is another who sees a descent into a dystopian, 1984-type surveillance culture where the last shreds of privacy have been lost.
Such legitimate privacy concerns will inevitably form part of the debate around the use and control of the data from wearable technologies. In the U.S., tech giants have already clashed with regulators and lawmakers who want to ensure data from activity trackers and other health technologies is covered by existing privacy protections. However, privacy concerns are hardly new for health care market researchers, who are already experienced in securing the privacy of respondents. Like mobile, health care market research using wearable devices will come with challenges but market researchers are ideally placed to understand and overcome them.
With their vast potential, not least in the field of health care market research, there is little doubt that wearable technologies will soon be a reality for us all. 2015 is set to be a boom year with the release of the Apple Watch and the will.i.am-fronted Puls smartcuff, as well as the rollout of designer devices like Ralph Lauren’s Polo Tech smartshirt and Tommy Hilfiger’s solar-powered jackets to keep your devices topped up.
Are health care market researchers ready to take advantage of the benefits of these new technologies? Only time will tell.