Our devices are going to coach us

Adidas announced at GigaOM’s Mobilize 2013 Conference that they’re creating a smartwatch that can provide location, speed, heart rate and serve music during workouts. That’s interesting, sure, but there’s something remarkable they’re adding: coaching. An athlete wearing the Adidas smartwatch will provide coaching through the watch’s screen or headphones.

This is certainly a glimpse of what’s to come for mobility and wearables. It will require a new and faster level of data integration and event processing to accommodate what’s happening in the moment.

But that’s only part of the story.

Into the workplace

It is only a very short step from coaching a runner on a city street to coaching a worker deployed to the field, a soldier or the warehouse employee. Imagine the value of knowing key biometrics and combining that information historical patterns for accidents or health problems. We have laws to protect employees but what we’ve legislated for safety in the past was based on lowest common denominators for health and safety. There are enormous efficiency gains and financial reward when the rules can be driven by data and not best guesses. There are enormous safety gains when the rules can be driven by analytical insights that are being compared to real-time conditions.

This is where things are headed…rather than working from hunch and creating broad limitations through regulations, we can know with a high degree of accuracy what people can really do and how they can do it safely. We can reward them for their extra productivity without increasing the risk of accident or health issue.

Big Data and analytics are the end of the era of hunch.