VIDEO: A glimpse of wearable tech for HR?
SteveI have given a few presentations this year on how advanced technologies like wearable tech, the Internet of Things, and robotics might change work and workplaces, but often in these talks it has seemed like the concepts have felt a little remote or not totally relevant to folks in the audiences (usually HR/Talent pros).
It is one thing to envision how connected machines, robots, or drones are going to change work on the front lines, but how much, really, will they impact the day-to-day work in HR, Talent, or Recruiting? I suppose HR pros have a right to be a little skeptical about the nature or level of likely disruption.
Well before you get too comfortable in concluding that HR will be kind of immune to these kinds of technological advances, take a look at a quick (2 minutes or so) video, (embedded below, Email and RSS subscribers will have to click through), of what potential wearables might have in HR, recruiting, etc. The video is a demo of a Google Glass application prototype from Germany's Fraunhofer Institute, and I think you might be able to see some obvious, (if creepy) use cases for your work in HR or recruiting.
The technology, dubbed SHORE (Sophisticated High-speed Object Recognition), gauges emotions such as anger, happiness, sadness and surprise and projects this information directly onto the screen of Google Glass, sort of annotating the face of the person you're speaking with.
Pretty cool right?
An application that gives you a better read on the emotions of the person with which you are speaking?
Isn't a lot of HR/Recruiting centered on actually speaking with people, getting a read on them, trying to possibly get behind what they are actually saying?
Wouldn't this kind of a technology, (when further developed and refined), have some role in HR/Recruiting?
Reader Comments (3)
Very interesting, Steve. Although the tech needs some work (i.e., Shore age estimated her to be 21, then 33, then 23...) I can see how wearables can and will influence #WorkSpaceNext. However, I can also see where allowing tech to provide too much insight on human factors - such as emotion, mood, intent, etc. - will get the enterprise in a LOT of trouble. Business has to use the tech wisely and not allow it to take the "human" out of everything.
BTW, despite my comments, I am by no means a sci-fi junky and have no vision of SkyNet taking over the world.
Wow, its amazing. Thanks Steve for sharing it. Recruiting as well as many other responsibilities of HR e.g. Training, Employee Negotiation etc. requires HR personnel to stay alert and read what other party is trying to say. Understanding the human emotions is really very difficult art and everyone can not master it. This technology is really amazing and it could assist HR department a lot.
Yeah there are some pretty smart minds at that place. Don't forget - they were the origin of the MP3 format. Prior to that the average song could only get compressed to 40mb (aka almost same size as it was on CD).
Fraunhofer MPeg Layer 3 got a song down to 5mb. Meaning you could fit a HUNDREDS on to a computer hard-drive (at the time).
This was back when Apple made computers that would break / catch on fire. And IBM sold PC's.