Wearable technologies in organizations privacy, efficiency and autonomy in work

Wearable Technologies
in Organizations
Privacy, Efficiency and
Autonomy in Work

Aleksandra Przegalinska


Wearable Technologies in Organizations
“Przegalinska’s solid academic insight into the pros and cons of wearable
technology allows us to understand not only the technological, but also social,
implications of this incoming revolution. This fascinating and readable book will
become an essential text for both practitioners and scholars, to whom I highly
recommend it.”
—Dariusz Jemielniak, Professor of Management in Networked Societies
(MINDS), Kozminski University, Poland


Aleksandra Przegalinska

Wearable Technologies
in Organizations
Privacy, Efficiency and Autonomy in Work


Aleksandra Przegalinska
Management in Networked
and Digital Societies
Kozminski University
Warsaw, Poland

ISBN 978-3-030-00906-9
ISBN 978-3-030-00907-6  (eBook)
/>Library of Congress Control Number: 2018958596
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
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Preface

This book was written out of curiosity. The Internet of Things is an open
field with plenty of emerging, exciting possibilities. And even though

there already appeared a substantial amount of literature about it, in
many ways it remains an unknown territory with numerous traps. My
motivation to put this book together was to attempt a more holistic view
of the complex landscape of wearable technologies, trackers, and sensors.
Emerging technologies always fascinated me. I work as Assistant
Professor at Kozminski University. I did my Ph.D. in the philosophy of artificial intelligence. Currently, I am also a Research Fellow at
the Center for Collective Intelligence at Massachusetts Institute of
Technology in Boston with tracking technologies at the core of my
research interests. My background includes diplomatic service at the
Council of European Union in Brussels and as an international representative of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage in the matters
related to media and technology regulations.
The broad sphere of high technologies has always been at the core
of my private and professional interests. Currently however, even those
uninterested have to face the fact that it is going to matter more and
more in their our daily lives.
Over the past few decades, we have observed how technology has
emerged as a strong power and key factor in the effectiveness, collaboration, and disruption of organizations and individual lives.
We have all experienced the ambiguous impact of various aspects of
high-technologies’ acceleration in our daily routines that span from the
v


vi   

Preface

positive empowerment of collaborative efforts to its negative aspects
envisaged in addictive behaviors, the disappearance of privacy, and surveillance. Moreover, high technologies fiercely impacted workspaces and
the workforce as recent developments range from security and management to wellness applications. Software can manage group discussions
that, often enough, result in shared understandings, new meanings,

and collaborative learning. Cloud technology, mobile technology, collaboration applications, and highly specialized artificial intelligence bear
the promise of radical enhancement of the way we perceive the world,
work, and human interactions. Technology plays a fundamental role in
this process because it allows the Internet users to optimize their time,
enhance interactions, promote visibility, and drive continuous collaboration. Furthermore, with the rise of the Internet of Things, smart data,
and increasingly sophisticated machine learning techniques, we will all
experience the growing impact of technology in the future.
Warsaw, Poland

Aleksandra Przegalinska


Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to Armin Beverungen who gave me a lot of
constructive feedback on the early drafts of many of the chapters, giving
us thoughtful advice, suggestions, and comments. Lots of great ideas
came from Leon Ciechanowski who contributed to the research and not
only helped me with refining some arguments, but also directed us to
some interesting angles. Peter Gloor gave me a lot of useful feedback,
and I am very thankful for his support and help. I am grateful to Marcin
Stolarz, Mikolaj Golubiewski, and Wojciech Pedzich for their language
corrections and editing suggestions.
Writing this book was supported by Aleksandra Przegalinska’s Polish
Ministry of Science and Higher Education’s Grant Mobility Plus (DN/
MOB/102/IV/2015).

vii

Contents

1Introduction1
2 Privacy, Safety, and Autonomy15
3 Addiction and Distraction25
4Self-Enhancement33
5Collaboration47
6 Context Awareness and Ambient Intelligence57
7 Wearable Technology: Summary67
Supplementary Material83
Index85

ix


About

the

Author

Aleksandra Przegalinska holds a Ph.D. in philosophy of artificial
­intelligence. She is an Assistant Professor at Kozminski University, currently a Research Fellow at the Center for Collective Intelligence at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston. She was a recent
visiting scholar at The New School for Social Research/Brown University
in New York City (2014). In 2011 Aleksandra worked as the Chairman
of Media Regulation Working Party at the Council of European Union
in Brussels. As a William J. Fulbright Scholar Aleksandra also majored in
Sociology at The New School for Social Research in New York (2012),
where she participated in research on identity in virtual reality, with particular emphasis on Second Life.

Aleksandra’s current primary research interest include consequences
of introducing artificial intelligence systems to people’s social and professional sphere as well as wearable technologies and human/bot interaction.

xi


List of Figures

Fig. 7.1
Fig. 7.2
Fig. 7.3
Fig. 7.4
Fig. 7.5
Fig. 7.6

Age groups in the study
Participants’ nationality chart
Quantification of mental and physical phenomena.
Participants could choose more than one category
Aggregated answers to the question “What are you currently
quantifying?” shows the proportion of physical to the mental
quantification interests
The chart presents the motivation for self-tracking expressed
by the participants of our study
The chart presents the frequency of self-tracking.
The “irregularly” category means that, for instance,
a person engages in self-tracking only when she reads
a book and wants to take a note of it, or when a person
does not remember when precisely she uses apps
or devices for quantifying

69
69
70
71
72

73

xiii


CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract  This chapter is the introduction to the whole book. It
discusses the rise and history of wearable technologies as well as the
growth of self-tracking communities that extensively use wearable
devices. In this chapter the reader can also find the outline of the whole
book, its concept and main hypothesis related to the future direction of
wearable technologies. What I am arguing for is that from tracking of
simple and easily quantifiable activities, we are currently moving to more
complex, robust collaborative and sophisticated forms of tracking the
Self and others, also in the organizational context.
Keywords  Wearable technologies · Wearable electronics
Self-tracking · History · Organizations

·

Towards the end of his presidency, Barack Obama started wearing that
Fitbit Surge (Ryan 2015a) and it was related to greater plans for the
integration of wearable tech into the American society. The administration also announced that the Department of Defense would invest $75
million in a “flexible hybrid electronics” innovation center in Silicon
Valley called the Manufacturing Innovation Institute for Flexible Hybrid
Electronics. The teams in Silicon Valley were supposed to be led by
FlexTech Alliance (“Semi’s Technology” 2018), a public–private manu­
facturing consortium based in San Jose, to “secure U.S. leadership in
next-generation bendable and wearable electronic devices.” The goal was
© The Author(s) 2019
A. Przegalinska, Wearable Technologies in Organizations,
/>
1


2  A. PRZEGALINSKA

to go far beyond step tracking and “unleash wearable devices to improve
medical health monitoring and personal fitness; soft robotics to care for
the elderly or assist wounded soldiers; and lightweight sensors embedded into the very trellises and fibers of roads, bridges, and other structures across the globe.” Overall, the Manufacturing Innovation Institute
for Flexible Hybrid Electronics received a total investment of $171 million to lead a consortium of 162 companies, nonprofits, labs, and universities, including Apple, Motorola, Kodak, John Deere, and Boeing.
At the time of the announcement, the White House published a list of
possible wearable tech applications (“Obama Administration” 2015),
including monitoring vital signs and physical states to optimize health and
lifestyles decisions as well as dramatically improving medical technology
delivery—through biomarkers and device implants—which can monitor
vital signs for the elderly, those with chronic conditions, and “the soldiers
during combat [… ] enabling embedded sensors to monitor the state of
commercial automobiles and aircrafts operating in harsh environments
such as undersea pressures or extreme temperatures [… ] improving

security operations,” with applications in lightweight robotics, as well as,
“next-generation imaging and sensing capabilities, used across the entire
spectrum of land, air, sea, and space-based systems [and, last but not
least] reducing the electronic systems package size and weight through
electronics that conform to complex shapes such as aircraft wings or
unattended vehicle platforms, and integrating electronics in clothing and
fabrics” (Ryan 2015b).

The Rise of Wearable Technology
“Wearable technology” and “wearable devices” are terms often used to
describe electronics and computers that are integrated into clothing and
other accessories (watches, glasses, headbands and jewelry) that can be
worn on the body (Bousquet et al. 2012). Such devices always stay in
touch with the body, unless users willingly keep it off. The equipment
comes with a limited CPU power, battery life, and connectivity. In some
cases, the devices work better than a smartphone or other devices in the
exchange of data in real-time. Recently, wearable devices began to have a
very large impact in the areas of fitness, health, and medicine. Moreover,
in the last few years, wearable devices saw increasing attention of venture
capitalists, technology startups, established electronics companies, scientists, and consumers. Their most popular functions include measuring


1 INTRODUCTION 

3

physiological data (Swan 2012a) and receiving bio-feedback while the
user was engaged in sports or fitness activities.
Wearables include personal activity trackers, step trackers along with
other devices that can be used to log food intake, monitor heart rates,

gauge skin temperature and perspiration, and monitor sleep (Wright and
Keith 2014). The majority of wearable technologies synchronizes with
personal computers and smartphones, in which dedicated applications
are installed to store and analyze data, as well as share them with friends
and the community. Because trackers measure and analyze a variety of
information, there are many trackers and applications on the market
that specialize in different aspects of health care and activity, like Shine,
Basis, Withings Pulse, Fitbit, Polar Loop, Jawbone, Garmin Connect,
RunKeeper, Endomondo, and many others, including those self-made
or self-appropriated by users. These products measure physical activity
in terms of calories burned, record daily activities, track sleep efficiency,
and provide extensive information on these activities to the user. They
could generally be classified as measurement-oriented and passive, but
one should also mention that this variety also holds such whose main feature is an active disciplining of the user. For example, Pavlok administers
electric shocks in the event of user’s breaching of rules. Other examples
of such active technologies will also be presented in the further chapters.
Monitoring, measuring, and recording the elements of one’s body
and life as a form of self-improvement or self-reflection have been discussed and realized since ancient times. However, the introduction of
digital technologies—particularly biosensing ones—has put them on
a different level and created space for communities organized around
tracking activities (Swan 2012b).
Self-tracking has a long history and prehistory that started with diaries, scales, wristwatches, thermometers and other simple devices. People
discussed and engaged in tracking since the ancient times. In other
words, we monitored, measured, and recorded elements of our body
and life as a form of self-improvement or self-reflection. Long before the
development of the Internet of Things, the seventeenth-century Chinese
abacus ring allowed bean counters to perform mathematical tasks by
moving tiny beads along nine rows. In the 1960s, Edward O. Thorpe
and Claude Shannon created a smart shoe that could fairly accurately
predict the end position of the roulette ball. However, few knew about

these solutions, which limited them to experimentation (da Costa and de
Sá-Soares 2016; Guizzo 2003).


4  A. PRZEGALINSKA

Personal informatics that we know today began in the 1980s with
life-logging: the tracking of personal data generated by behavioral activities (Calvo and Peters 2014). However, even though people have long
used simple, analog devices to record, reflect upon and regulate their
bodily states and processes, we are currently witnessing a dramatic efflorescence in the use of digital technology to self-track (Crawford et al.
2015).
The proliferation of mobile digital devices witnessed life-logging
tools break out of research labs and move to the hands of the masses.
One could mention here at least two interest groups formed in the second half of 2008 to explore, brainstorm, and share their self-tracking
experiences: the Quantified Self in the San Francisco. Soon, others like
PatientsLikeMe and DIYgenomics followed.
These communities coined and developed the idea of ‘n = we’ understood as coming together in health collaboration communities that
made their n = 1 discoveries less anomalous, and statistically significant. These groups gradually started to resemble social movements
by including in their claims proposals what does it mean to be a biocitizen (Cooter 2008; Swan 2012a). They advocated for data-sharing, a
more proactive health self-management, and playfully performed, gamified responsibility-taking. Their ultimate goal is to smoothly integrate
technology with the human body and make it a part of people’s daily
life. Within this context, the human body becomes the central element
of Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) through a departure from the
desktop-based interaction towards mobile and wearable applications
(Bordegoni et al. 2012).
The underlying assumption here is that data is an objective resource
useful for quick bring visualization and information of a situation, and
that—psychologically—data should entail an element of empowerment,
control, and fun. The goal is not only to gain access to data, but also
to build a motivational system that helps to remove habits that one perceives as harmful from daily routines. This objectification of data combined with self-regulation is in itself very interesting. Wearables, and

other sensors, are marketed and perceived as digital coaches whose continuous tracking capacities, big-data analytics and feedback loops can
help consumers navigate the field of everyday choice making and better
control how their activities affect their health.


1 INTRODUCTION 

5

Self-Tracking Communities
As mentioned above, the appearance of tracking devices on the market
generated an outburst of communities that consist of self-tracking enthusiasts willing to share experiences and collaboratively experiment with the
gadgets. So far, the most prominent one among them—the Quantified
Self—mainly focused on medical tracking applications. However, we
currently observe the need for an “ambient intelligence” (Zelkha et al.
1998; Achten 2005), a notion we will come back to later in this book—
not only within self-tracking communities but also among various consumers groups—in which intelligent devices can integrate into the
everyday surroundings and provide diverse services to everyone. This
“ambient intelligence” should be personalized, embedded, unobtrusive,
and usable anytime and anywhere. The main factor that distinguishes
wearable computing from other applications such as smart environments
is the nature of the sensors that are used. Smart environment sensors
are embedded in the environment themselves. They typically consist of
wired or wireless sensors detecting or measuring motion, light, temperature, humidity, and other conditions that are descriptive of the environment. In contrast, wearable biosensors are positioned directly or
indirectly on the body (Nafus and Sherman 2014) and not on the physical environment.
Among those biosensors, there is a particular group that attempts to
encode something that for a long time was not transparent outside the
laboratory context. This group consists of brain activity trackers that
can be associated with affective computing, that is: bridging emotions
and computers. The term “affective computing” was coined in 1995 by

Rosalind Picard (Picard 1995; Nissan 1999; Picard and Wolf 2015), but
had to wait two decades for material manifestations. Today we know that
the machine can measure emotions in different ways: using text analysis, studies of physiological parameters, observing behavioral patterns,
facial expressions, and recognizing emotions in voice or body posture of
users. Concerned by the capacity for new technologies to produce cognitive overload, a group of researchers turned to the development of what
they call “attentive user interfaces” (Vertegaal et al. 2003). Particularly,
precise measurement of facial expressions is gaining popularity, because
results of this type of tracking can be sold to marketing departments and
advertising content producers. By tracking the user’s gaze, an interface


6  A. PRZEGALINSKA

can adaptively highlight urgent issues and background those of less
importance. Furthermore, there appeared new applications in affective
computing concerning mental health and mental self-care.
The era of personalized “mind-tracking” that basically consists in
direct or indirect tracking of brain activity has long been pronounced
upon us (Starner 1996; Axisa et al. 2005; Cao 2013) and it is just beginning to take shape.
Another interesting marker of this change is that wearable technologies and sensors are becoming parts of national and supranational strategies indicates their potential in transforming societies and economies.
Already now we can see how they are becoming widespread in healthcare
and wellness, hospitality and tourism, as well as the financial app market.
Health-care and medical industry use wearable apps to collect the clinical
data such as blood pressure, pH, as well as other tests like steps taken or
calories burned. What is more, they quite surely share the biggest bite of
the market and emerging as the strongest competitor in the coming days.
When it comes to travels, tourism, and hospitality industry, wearable
apps mainly facilitate location-based tracking of places of interest along
with keyless access to real estate and services. In banking and fintech sector, the financial institutions, particularly banks, have more opportunity
to explore the wearable application possibilities, including balance checking, money transactions, or locating the nearest ATM. Nevertheless, the

economic and financial potential of these devices is much broader, just
like the scope of their future applications.

The Outline
In this book, I concentrate on the striking metamorphosis that wearable
technologies currently undergo. My focus will be rather on the devices
and their diverse affordances (Zhang and Patel 2006; Jones 2003;
Norman 1999). I will try to show how changes in the usage of tracking
devices—even on a very personal and private level—can introduce important changes in management and organizations. For instance, along
the lines of humanistic management perspective (Melé 2003; Kostera
2015), companies and institutions should emphasize stimulating employees motivation, activity, and creativity to administer operations through
understanding, respecting, and provoking the enthusiasm of people.
In general, tracking can bring about several issues that require extensive deliberations in this context. Development and usage of wearable


1 INTRODUCTION 

7

tracking tools par excellence is both a challenge and chance, as tracking
technologies can quite obviously become tools of control and scrutiny
at the level not experienced before while simultaneously bring back long
forgotten management paradigms that almost entirely focus on increasing productivity, often packed as beneficial and somewhat mandatory
wellness program.
More than a century ago, in 1909, Frederick Winslow Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management (Taylor 1914) and started
the scientific management movement by studying how work was performed and how this performance affected worker productivity. Thus,
Taylor proposed that by optimizing, automating and simplifying jobs,
productivity would increase. He also advanced the idea that workers and
managers needed to cooperate with one another which was again very
different from the way work was typically done in businesses beforehand.

Taylor believed that all workers were motivated by money and better
performance meant more money and individualized assessment of work.
With bricklayers, he experimented with the various motions required and
developed an efficient way to lay bricks. His scientific method consisted
of calculating the time needed for the various elements of a task and
through that developing the “best” way to complete that task. Taylor’s
principles included, among others, matching workers to their jobs based
on capability and motivation, and training them to work at maximum
efficiency, monitoring worker performance, and providing instructions
and supervision to ensure that they were using the most efficient ways
of working as well as allocating the work between managers and workers
so that the managers spent their time planning and training, allowing the
workers to perform their tasks efficiently.
Taylorian methods have changed the very meaning of work itself and
the economic and social integration of most of the working population.
Far from being rejected by workers, Taylorism became one of the most
recognized symbols of progress. Far from being an authoritarian and
deskilling system, it was constructed as a positive system, giving protection and security. It is worth noting, however, that the major problem
with Taylorism lay not in the strive for perfection but in the methods of
achieving them. Taylor’s idea was emphasizing maximizing efficiency and
that—from Taylor’s perspective—lay mainly in monitoring performance
to ensure the most efficient ways of working.
At the time when Taylor was introducing the principles of scientific
management, technological tools for detailed monitoring and control


8  A. PRZEGALINSKA

were rather scarce and limited. Nowadays, however, with the exponential
growth of the Internet of Things and all connected devices (among which

smartphones and wearables play a crucial role) the situation has dramatically
changed. As Natasha Dow Schull notices, wearable technologies understood as key artifacts in a new cultural convergence of sensor technology
and self-care are marketed as digital compasses whose continuous tracking
capacities and big-data analytics can help consumers navigate the field of
everyday choice-making and better control how various physical activities
affect their health (Schüll 2016). “By offering consumers a way to simultaneously embrace and outsource the task of lifestyle management – Schull
writes – such products at once exemplify and short-circuit cultural ideals for
individual responsibility and self-regulation.” However, with the arrival of
new ways of self-tracking and more complex devices, it is no longer about
physical activity. What is more, private tracking intersects more and more
often with professional tracking and a clear distinction between the two is
more difficult to find. Self-tracking overlaps with tracking others, and professional performance (where productivity again becomes a key feature)
becomes one of the most important parameters to follow.
What I would like to argue for is that from self-tracking of simple and
easily quantifiable activities, we move to more complex, robust collaborative and sophisticated forms of tracking the Self and others, also in the
organizational context. During the formative years of the wearable technology boom, marketing was centered almost entirely on consumers.
However, recent trends indicate that giants in the wearable tech industry
are now designing their products with business applications in mind. The
recent wearable tech influx in the business world was launched with the
promise of improving workplace productivity and the overall efficiency of
organizations. Despite their long history, only recently did these devices
begin to significantly impact the areas of fitness, health, and medicine.
Recently, we could experience and observe the proliferation of tracking
hardware and applications along with the emergence of new, collaborative aspects of self-quantification, in which the focal point moves from the
individual to the platform and its virtual community. How and to what
extent will the new Internet and Communication Technologies (ICT)
technologies have novel cognitive potentialities? What may we expect
from these potentialities? What role and degree of agency do we have in
the deployment and use of these technologies? How do we build communities through and around them (Swan 2012b; Calvo and Peters 2014)?
Wearable devices and smartphones reveal tensions and ambiguous

influence of tracking. This book presents a balanced view that reveals


1 INTRODUCTION 

9

both the positive and negative aspects of wearable technologies. My
approach toward wearable technologies is unbiased, as I will not present
another take on wearable technology only embedded in critical theory.
Moreover, I will discuss the potential future scenarios for wearable technology in the context of rapid developments of the IoT and as a social
and organizational phenomenon.
The main hypothesis of my book is that—when it comes to wearable
technologies—we have not seen anything yet. In other words, it is just a
beginning of a revolution that will truly transform our lives in the next two
decades. We are yet to develop devices that will be “intelligent,” “adaptable,” and allow significant physical or cognitive enhancement. However,
we still may detect the early signs of their arrival. Wearable devices like
Google Glass and smartwatches open up new opportunities, including
robust data collection and insights into user interaction. We no longer have
to wake up our smartphone and open an app because wearables allow us
to stay connected at all times. And with that connection comes a constant
flow of live data that is an opportunity but also a challenge for the most
forward-thinking companies, teams, and research groups to create new
technologies, services, and even entirely new industries.
Often, scholars depict a vision of the future of the Internet of Things
as an abundance and multiplication of sensors. This corresponds with the
vision of the “quantified body” covered with many wearable technologies and widespread use of such futuristic inventions as “smart dust.”
As I described above, this is a revolution related to context-awareness.
However, another way to think about it is not as a plethora of devices, but
the minimal number that focuses on more holistic tools. This approach

envisions the rise of wearable technologies as more dependent on the
advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning. If major
progress happens in this sphere, there may soon emerge truly contextaware systems that do not exist yet (Ilyas and Mahgoub 2016; Perez and
Kreinovich 2018).
What I will also try to show is how changes in the use of tracking
devices—even on a very personal and private level—can be translated
into important changes in management and organizations. In this context, self-tracking in general, and mind-tracking in particular, can bring
about several issues that require extensive deliberations. Development
and usage of wearable tracking tools par excellence is both a challenge
and chance, as tracking technologies can quite obviously become tools
of control and scrutiny at the level not experienced before while simultaneously bringing back long forgotten management paradigms that


10  A. PRZEGALINSKA

almost entirely focus on increasing productivity. Thus, the book comprehensively overviews the current changes in self-tracking practices and the
way they affect productivity and the organization of work.
Moreover, the book is purposefully specific about the examples. It
critically observes different types and ranges of trackers without putting all eggs in one basket. Thorough tracing of different functionalities
leads to their better understanding. I do not discuss self-regulation in
the health context, as this has already been diligently done in many different ways (Swan 2012b; Schüll 2016), and only touch upon the issue
of discourse around trackers, as there is plenty of literature dedicated to
this topic as well (Cederström and Spicer 2015; Pedersen 2013). Thus,
I focus on exposing the more general shift that currently happens within
individual self-tracking practices and tracking communities, as well as its
potential impact on organizations and group work. As the book summarizes no particular study results, it opens the subject of wearable technologies and the Internet of Things not only to scholars but also IT and
management professionals along with everyone else interested in the current technological developments.
The book comes in two main interrelated parts and consists of six
chapters preceded by an introduction. The introduction to wearable technologies describes their past and current usage both in private
and organizational context. Here, the work particularly focuses on the

evolution from simple trackers like pedometers to more complex and
context-aware systems such as such as neuro-trackers and wearable
brain–machine interfaces that allow users to measure more sophisticated
activities and mental states. The tension and ambiguous influence of
technology particularly surfaces in tracking. The introduction of digital
technologies—particularly bio-sensing—has shifted the ancient idea of
tracking to a different level and created a space for communities organized around tracking activities.
After the introduction, I focus on issues related to challenges and
potential threats of the rise of sensors. I address the following problems
and controversies related to wearable technology:
1. issues with safety, privacy, and the lack of control over data accessibility (based on the examples of typical trackers such as Fitbit);
2. the lack of work efficiency due to various online distractions (based
on notification systems of smartphones and smart rings such as
Ringly), as well as addiction to social media and technological
gadgets (based on the examples of Thync).


1 INTRODUCTION 

11

In the second part of the book, I concentrate on the various enactments of autonomy, solidarity, and collaboration related to the rise of
trackers and sensors such as:
1. autonomy and self-enhancement (based on the examples of individual tracking devices like the smart jewelry Bellabeat Leaf and
the so-called mindtrackers);
2. 
collaboration (based on the examples of collaborative tracking
tools such as sociometric badges);
3. context awareness and ambient intelligence (based on the examples
of bots and such smart sensors that adapt external environment to

individual needs).
The last chapter is an extended summary that presents the results of a
study related to the usage of wearable technologies, as well as final conclusions and outline of possible future trends.
I illustrate all the challenges and opportunities related to wearable
technologies with specific examples of wearable technology with thick
description of its functionality, design, and means of interaction with
users. Even though some examples of technologies appear in chapters
about the negative consequences of the technological shifts, this does
not mean that the specific technologies are bad. Similarly, the technologies that represent the positive impact of technology are not necessarily
exclusively good in the way they affect their users.
On a more formal note, this book sometimes interchangeably use
the notions of wearable technologies, tracking devices, and sensors.
Smartphones are usually mentioned separately because of their distinctive
features and popularity in the society, even though it could be argued
they belong to the wearable technology realm. In the past wearables and
sensors were not necessarily overlapping. The size of sensors and frontend electronics made it too difficult to use them in wearable tech to
gather physiological and movement data. However, today’s sensor is a
system that responds to a physical stimulus—such as heat, light, sound,
pressure, magnetism, or a particular motion—and transmits the resulting impulse. Such a sensor may be both a single device or a whole module, whose purpose is to detect events or changes in its environment and
send the information to other electronics, frequently a computer processor. Sensors and wearables allow continuous physiological monitoring
with reduced manual intervention at low cost and can be integrated


12  A. PRZEGALINSKA

into various accessories such as garments, hats, wristbands, socks, shoes,
eyeglasses, wristwatches, headphones, and smartphones. Some, mostly
medical-grade sensors, function on a stand-alone basis, but some cases
may still be dubbed “wearable telemedical devices.”

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CHAPTER 2

Privacy, Safety, and Autonomy

Abstract  This chapter is devoted to challenges and potential threats of the
rise of sensors and wearable technologies. The focus is put on the usage of
wearable technology in the context of safety, privacy, and the general lack of
control over data accessibility. One of the examples discussed is a popular
activity tracker, Fitbit, that struggled with various data leaks. Another example discussed in the cybersecurity context are spambots, zombiebots and
malicious bots. An attempt is made to delineate different types of problems
related to the way these devices interact with their users, voluntary data sharing, and structural capacities of the said devices in terms of data exchanges.
Keywords  Privacy

· Safety · Data · Leaks · Control · Transparency

Quite obviously, alongside the interactive possibilities, wearable technologies enable unprecedented opportunities to surveil individuals. In
fact, one of the first things that comes to people’s minds when they start
using a new device is whether their data is safe and how the device could
potentially be hacked. This surveillance is problematic for privacy but can

also offer novel cognitive and collaborative affordances as the technology begins to ever more closely fit our cognitive profiles. This intimate
and ever-present nature of our smartphones and wearable technologies
means that ICT ever more closely binds with our organic cognitive faculties and the collaborative nature of our tasks. When beacons, fitness
trackers, affective sensors, and smartglasses become ubiquitous, fully
© The Author(s) 2019
A. Przegalinska, Wearable Technologies in Organizations,
/>
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