Why wearables represent a PR opportunity, COVID trackers, and how to engage in intimate relations.

My heart rate right now is 67, and my daily walking average is 97. I've walked over five kilometres and over 10,000 steps today. How do I know that? Because I have a wearable on. Wearables, as we know, are probably one of the growth stories of the last two or three years. For Apple, their wearables have paced the iMac sales and the computer sales and are getting up there to be on line with the iPhone sales. Trackers and all the mobile apps that we can wear and carry around in our phones are hot news, because of the COVID tracking apps. In the UK, the National Health Service issued a press release on the 18th of June on the Test and Trace service which they launched on the Isle of Wight, a small island just off the south coast. They say in their press release that following rigorous field testing and a trial on the Isle of Wight, they've identified challenges with both their app and the Google-Apple framework. They go on to say that they've encountered a number of technical challenges, and that they had to stop the trial. Towards the end of the press release, they say that they are going to need to work with Apple and Google for the iOS and the Android platforms, because what the government is realizing is that they cannot develop a platform-agnostic app from scratch. Of course, any developer that's in the App Store knows that you need to build things that are within the framework of Google's Android or Apple. The British government, the Singaporean government, and governments around the world are realizing really the technology and power that multinational firms have. We're in an interesting place now, because the governments are no longer in control of the technology that they need to reach out and communicate directly with their own population. From a public relations point of view, it's a little bit embarrassing for the government, because they thought that they could take a stance and be developing something on their own without a nod to the technology platforms that are so deeply ingrained in all of our lives. On the other hand, this raises issues for PR and for consumers about the communication around privacy and public relations. Commercial entities like health insurance, airlines, supermarkets, these are all now trying to give us benefits if we'll engage with their wearable or trackable devices. It makes sense, for example, if it's an insurance firm to want to know about our lifestyle and about our residual health benefits. The trade off is you get lower premiums. So from a PR point of view, we're going down a very interesting place, because wearables and what are now called hearables are growth markets, but obviously, they're things that, as consumers and as businesses, we're embracing, but we're also getting quite nervous about. What we've got now on a PR front is solutions like the Test and Trace for COVID being met with some anxiety from the general public even if it is being endorsed by the medical community and the fact that it relies heavily on technology platforms for rollout and for consistency. That means, quite possibly, that we, as consumers or businesses, are sharing our data with the government through these platforms of Google or of Apple. We are entering a new era from a PR point of view in which there is a term called algorithmic PR, which is all about how data is being used for delivering information through platforms like Google My Business, which I previously mentioned. Algorithmic PR is going to be involved in analyzing the data that comes from all of our wearables and hearables and our smart home devices and starting to create metadata which becomes the basis for communication going back out into the marketplace. What's going to be interesting there is that we are going to be seeing metadata come back from different users that may not be by geography, but maybe by demographic, for example, or by people with a certain body weight or a certain physiology as we've seen with COVID. We're seeing the same health profiles around the world being impacted, rather than people just being by geography or by culture. From a public relations perspective, when we talk about our three different audience groups of internal, external, and allies within our SPEAK|pr program, wearables, hearables, and smart home devices are creating a level of granularity in those audience groups that we could never have imagined before when it comes to PR. Maybe it'll be time to replace the word "public relations" with "intimate relations," because the data that is going to be coming back from all these devices, including my heartbeat, for example, is going to be increasingly personal. I'm going to be expecting to get information relating to me and my circumstances that mirrors the data that I'm producing as a result of the watch I'm wearing, the phone I'm carrying, the purchases I'm making, and even now around the smart home where we can turn lights on and off at different times, where we can have a doorbell which has got a camera on it, where we're getting all this profiling that is showing people's behavior and importantly, the response that people have to those kind of activities. This is becoming a big area. Pharma companies have gotten involved with buying into startups. Bayer bought $25 million worth of funding with a company called Medopad, which is a UK startup developing AI methods for building and tracking digital biomarkers. Alphabet, the umbrella company, has been involved in thermostats and the nest offering for video doorbells, and has security cameras that automatically adjust settings based on user behavior. So as we have wearables, hearables, and trackables in our home, we're creating data which is becoming part of an automated response by other activities and other devices. At some stage or other, when we're doing our public relations and our media relations, we're going to have to become aware of the impact of all of these different kinds of technologies. There was a research project undertaken by Charlotte Kerner and Victoria Goodyear in 2017 here in the UK on the Motivational Impact of Wearable Healthy Lifestyle Technologies. They took a look at the self-determination perspective of wearing Fitbits on adolescents. In this study, they gave Fitbits to children in one school in the southeast and another in the northwest of the UK. Over a period of time, what they found was quite interesting. The assumption had been that if you give these children trackable health devices which are telling the children if they're doing enough exercise, how many calories they're using thing that, somehow, it would impact their behavior. They discovered that, in the short term, there was an increase in the amount of activity that took place, but it was through short-term motivation around competition, guilt, and internal pressure. In the longerterm, behavioral patterns were what they called amotivation. After eight weeks, the children then ceased to actually undertake activity and ceased to participate. In other words, the external drivers that were coming to their wrists which were around, "You're not doing enough. You should do this more. How many steps did you take compared to other children on the playground?," were not sufficient to create behavioral change. What they were really doing was to create potentially negative implications for young people, because they weren't geared around internal desires for change. They were geared around other people's metrics for what they felt these people should be doing. This then brings us to the role of PR, because technology in itself doesn't change behavior. I'm sitting here now and I can tell you that my heartbeat is 70, so I'm obviously quite relaxed, which is great. However, what it doesn't do is to impact how I behave while I'm making the recording. When we look at public relations around this new area of wearables, hearables, and trackables, as a PR community, we have to start to address the issues of personal privacy, we have to address the issue of anxiety, a d we must also address the i sues of motivation. For those c mpanies that are starting to p omote wearables and all these o her technologies that b sically dovetail into the b ometrics and the psychometrics o consumers and businesses, we r ally have to think about what i is that we are doing that's o tside of the technology to r assure, to engage, and to m tivate the people that are u ing it. Said differently, t ese trackables should not be t e drivers of the communication s rategy, they should be a gmenting it, and the data that t ey're creating should be g ving us some clues as to what o her information we could be s aring. I've previously mentioned Google My Business and about geography-based tracking, and from a PR perspective, the importance of encouraging people or giving them traffic information so that they know that it won't take very much time to get to you if the store is about to close, or if there's an emergency, to know which is the nearest hospital. The impact of wearables, I think, is going to be that, as PR people, we've got to reassure audiences, to sell the benefits, and to be mindful of the potential downside of those as we've seen from this Kerner and Goodyear study, especially when it comes to young people. If we're marketing products and services to young people that are basically a technology-based product or service, we also have a duty of care to those children and also to society that we are creating guidelines around what those technologies can and cannot do. I do think this when I look at the impact of screens and screen time, that there isn't any guidance given by the manufacturers to the children. There are some settings now on the iOS that we can control the time, that we can change the light shift, and so on, but education for the young people who are using the technology seems to be, so far, not there. There's no, if you like, on the packet health warning as there is on tobacco or an alcohol. We then are giving devices and gadgets to these young people and maybe people who are not well-versed in the potential dangers of the technology products and tools that could have a major impact on their lives, without necessarily giving them an understanding of what to do with it, how to use it, and how it could integrate into an overall goal that they might set for themselves. This, of course, then comes back to our public relations message of purpose; if our company purpose is to improve the lives, improve the profitability, or in some way improve the world, so that as Paul Dunn from B1G1 would say, so that we can make a difference. From a PR point of view, if our companies are involved in using technology within the private space of our customers, our consumers, or our staff, then we have a duty to explain to them the role of that technology, what kind of data it's going to be collecting, and to give them the rights to opt in or out. If you have newsletters, there is the GDPR which are the guidelines on compliance and taking people's information without them knowing. We need start thinking with our consumers that we're sharing this information and who with to get them reassurance. If we don't do that, then the data will not be forthcoming. People will start to rebel against using those. The benefits of the wearable technology, the benefits of cameras in stores for monitoring of quality control procedures, using RFID tags, those benefits will be circumvented by people deciding to turn off the data collection. From the perspective of public relations, if we talk about algorithmic PR, which is the use of the data that we get from what we say and what we do, and using that to create new content and sharing that across platforms, we want to keep the benefits of that data, but we have to be responsible in our use of it. Part of that responsibility is going to be in communicating to people how we're gathering it. If we look at the UK NHS's and the Singaporean government's failure to gather data without partnering with iOS and Android, we've got an issue now where data protection is going to be collected by a third party or through a third party. From a PR point of view, a messaging point of view, it's going to be even more important than ever to collaborate and to be in alignment with those partners about the use of the data. As e saw with the Cambridge Ana ytica, failure to have int grity with data can lead to the downfall of a company. With respect to public relations, wearable technology is a new paradigm from a commercial perspective, as it is a whole new product category that can drain whole new lines of business as well as create a whole new area when it comes to public relations, and what I call now intimate relations, that we're going to need to address.