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From his perspective at his New York City office, the disruptive impact of wearables is easy to spot for Haytham Elhawary.
"In Central Park, your average runner is covered in sensors," he told the Safety Technology crowd at the 2017 Safety Leadership Conference.
From those sensors, he said, "these runners know their heart rate, they know how many miles they've run, they know the temperature and their oxygenation levels. They even know if they are doing better than their friends or whether they've gotten a personal record for the day."
Armed with smartwatches and gym-rugged gadgets, these amateur data-crunching athletes have taken over gyms and tracks in just the last couple of years, changing just about everything about exercise culture in the process. To Elhawary, it demonstrates a profound level of digital intelligence that never existed in this market before, creating a data-fueled army of activity, producing endless anecdotes of weight loss, lifestyle changes, and health improvements in the process.
All that is fantastic, but it does raise some serious questions for Elhawary.
Big data, analytics, KPIs, performance metrics—these are all the lifeblood of manufacturing and industrial productivity. But now with these cheap sensors—also part of the manufacturing world—they are being used to help joggers log better data than even some of the most sophisticated plants. On the individual data level, compared to these athletes, manufacturers are still totally in the dark.
As CEO of Kinetic, Elhawary is out to change this.
Ease the Strain
To accomplish this, Elhawary and his team decided...