Smart Health Devices

With a greater variety of employees working remotely, people are turning for their apparatus to monitor personal progress, seek motivation and track their health as they figure out a new routine to remain fit, happy and healthy when working from house. Workforce health and wellbeing has turned into a much bigger priority for employers. Various studies link a much healthier business culture to some decrease in employee turnover and greater employee participation and business productivity. We’re currently seeing a confluence of these trends, as companies wake-up to wearables‘ potential to improve the health of their work. However, knowing potential and understanding the way to unlock it are two quite different things. If employees have more insight into their own health, they will be more likely to make healthier decisions and as a result overall business health needs to improve. For this to perform though, workers will need to have an interest in improving their health. As anticipated, employers who are already utilizing wearables as part of their benefits programme discovered that uptake was higher amongst workers who were interested in maintaining a healthy lifestyle. The challenge would be engaging workers who aren’t as concentrated on actively improving their physical wellbeing.

Adoption may become less of a struggle, as insurers increasingly take on active roles in nudging employees towards healthier choices. US insurance company, John Hancock, was one of those first in the industry to apply mandatory fitness monitoring to all its schemes. Meanwhile, in the UK, Vitality allows workers to link their fitness tracker or phones for their scheme to earn points and rewards for adopting a healthy lifestyle. In the future, wearable information and fitness monitoring may even become a standard requirement for insurance providers. In the meantime, workers benefit two-fold from wearables, gaining data insights in their own health and decreased insurance premiums. Forward-thinking HR teams are already contemplating how to add further value by helping employees interpret and act on the data created by wearables, and also the way this positively influences their skill deliver on their gains approach. By tapping into the data created by wearables, businesses can gain real-time insights to the activity levels of their workforce, enabling them to create more targeted and efficient wellbeing strategies. When we subsequently add artificial intelligence (AI) to the equation, the capacity for pre-emptive maintenance and cost savings becomes huge. By way of example, if we were able to look at the current activity levels of employees, in combination with other health variables, such as their propensity to some hereditary conditions, companies might help evaluate their likelihood of ill health later in life. Giving employees an early warning that they are at increased risk of poor health would likely motivate them to take preventative actions now. But if employers are to derive real value in their public’s health information, they might need to take on a significant trust building exercise. Trust in data collection and usage has declined in the past few years and it’s clear that individuals may feel reluctant to present their company access to private data. Employees need to feel confident that any information collected about them will not impact their standing within the company. There are also a concern that employees vulnerable to those conditions could see a hike in their private medical insurance premiums. What is more, the regulatory challenges that surround GDPR could add another layer of sophistication. There is not any justification for employers to collect or store individuals’ health information — meaning drilling down to the micro level of an employees’ wellbeing would contravene legislation. Bearing the above in mind, it’s clear to see why so many employers are introducing wearables in some capability in their workplaces — our study found that 33 percent of companies are already collecting data from wearables and this is set to soar 81% within the next three years.To learn more, please go to our official website: www.reeftiger.co.uk