Take a quick trot around consumer tech publications these days and you’ll find a smorgasbord of exciting developments.
In the longer term scientists are working on cars that fly, and aeroplanes that fly themselves with auto-navigation features in what are expected to become busy skies, says Jacques van Wyk, COO at Ricoh SA.
Autonomous drones are already proven technology and in South Africa their feasibility for anti-rhino poaching and other activities is being investigated. The related worlds of virtual reality and augmented reality are blooming on the back of smaller and more powerful processing capabilities and a growing volume of mobile, powerful, smart devices coupled to the hunger for practical applications of mobile technologies.
A South African kid, Siyabulela Xuza, who went from a township in the Eastern Cape to Harvard in the US and back home invented his own rocket fuel and is currently working on a portable energy source to power mobile devices for Africa’s rural populations.
More pragmatically affordable for the average consumer, and probably closer to adoption, are wearable technologies. Many people have heard of smart watches and they already come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. In the category are sports watches that have proven to be very popular since they can record GPS tracks, heart rate, elevation and much more. They’re even specialised and available specifically for runners, divers, swimmers, hikers, climbers, triathletes and the like.
Supplying some of the impetus behind these devices is the desire many people have to live healthier lives, an aspiration typically associated with a growing middle class, increasing urbanisation, widespread and powerful mobile computing technologies, ubiquitous broadband and others. In fact, about the only wearable technology failure story of the last half decade is Google Glass. And that book’s not quite closed yet so keep your specs handy.
But how does wearable technology impact the workplace? A PwC report called The Wearable Future released in 2014 revealed that more than 80% of consumers listed eating healthier, exercising smarter and accessing more convenient medical care as important benefits of wearable technology. Healthier working habits, related to issues such as stress and anxiety, will be a top opportunity for the wearable tech developers.
Companies looking to the future must therefore prepare themselves for the integration of emerging and future technological innovations. The majority of the pressure they face will stem from out-dated processes and legacy systems as they struggle to integrate and co-operate.
In fact, research commissioned by Ricoh Europe in 2013 into what we term the iWorker, or intelligent worker, revealed that business leaders expect the majority of their workforce to be made up of employees that have 24/7 access to all the necessary information, by 2018.
And now for the surprise: despite the emerging tech, the trends, the clear advantages of mobile processing power, and the sheer number of people who use the stuff in their personal lives, some organisations are reluctant to adapt. Only 29% of employees said that their company has a strong appetite for creating new ways of working and deploying technologies to make the future a reality, in research we commissioned into the technologically evolved workplace of the future.
In a recent interview with the Economist Intelligence Unit on The Future of Work, sponsored by Ricoh Europe, Alan Hedge, director of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Laboratory at Cornell University, points out that this type of technology is just the start, “we are at the very beginning of a revolution in active objects and products that have sensors built into them.”
Professor Hedge terms this interaction between people and design technology everywhere ergonomics. While smart chairs and surfaces may not have made their way to all workplaces just yet, many people will already be using everywhere ergonomics at home. It’s only a matter of time before the boom in wearable devices begins to have a transformative effect on the workplace.
Think back to how the widespread adoption of smartphones kick started the shift to mobile working promised by portable computers years earlier. This new boom is likely to be bigger.
