He only had himself to blame, Mike Weston thought ruefully as he strapped¹ a Fitbit to his wrist one cold February morning. His company was about to start tracking him 24 hours a day, gathering² data on everything from his sleep quality and heart rate to his location and web browsing³ habits.

在今年2月的一个寒冷的早上，迈克•韦斯顿(Mike Weston)把一个Fitbit手环套在手腕上，沮丧地想这只能怪自己。他将受到自己公司全天候的追踪，并被采集从睡眠质量和心率到所处位置和上网习惯等各种数据。

“I was really quite grumpy about it, I didn’t want to put myself on display like that,” he says. But as chief executive of Profusion⁴, a data science consultancy, he had been urging his team of number crunchers to plan more ambitious internal projects — and this was the one they had come up with.

韦斯顿说道：“我真的感到非常不爽，我不想这么展示自己。”但作为数据科学咨询公司Profusion的首席执行官，他一直在敦促自己的数据分析团队策划一些更具雄心的内部项目，于是他们就提出了这个项目。

For 10 days, Profusion’s data scientists used Fitbits and other apps to track 171 personal metrics for 31 staff who volunteered (including the somewhat reluctant Mr Weston). Combing through the data, the analysts⁵ found they could group the staff into clusters, based on shared patterns of behaviour. They labelled one group “Busy and Coping”; another “Irritated and Unsettled”.

在十天时间里，Profusion的数据科学家们使用Fitbit和其他应用来追踪31名员工志愿者（包括有些不情愿的韦斯顿）的171项个人指标。分析师们通过整理这些数据发现，可以按照一些共同的行为模式对这些员工分组。他们把一组员工称为“忙于应对型”，将另一组称为“烦躁不安型”。

Technology has made it possible for employers to monitor employees more closely than ever, from GPS trackers for delivery drivers to software that tracks which websites office workers visit. Companies such as Profusion think wearable gadgets⁶ could open a new frontier in workplace analytics, albeit⁷ one that would further blur⁸ the lines between our work and private lives.

从跟踪送货司机的GPS定位仪到追踪办公室员工浏览网站习惯的软件，技术让雇主能够比以往更严密地监控员工。Profusion等公司认为，可穿戴设备可能为办公场所分析开辟了新的前沿阵地，虽然它将会进一步模糊工作和私人生活之间的界限。

“I think there’s an inevitability⁹ that it will gain ground, and there’s a backlash risk that will follow if the data get abused,” says Mr Weston.

韦斯顿表示：“我认为，可穿戴设备普及开来是势所必然的，而如果数据被滥用，就有引起强烈反弹的风险。”

For employers, the simplest way to use wearable gadgets (and so far the most common) is to give them to staff and try to nudge them into healthier lifestyles — a financially worthwhile goal if the company is on the hook for their health insurance. BP, for example, gives Fitbits to workers in North America and offers them rewards if they meet activity targets. Indeed, one of Fitbit’s five strategic goals is to “further penetrate¹⁰ the corporate¹¹ wellness market”, according to its IPO prospectus¹². Wearables could also be straightforward¹³ tools.

对雇主来说，使用可穿戴设备最简便（也是迄今最常见）的方法是，把它们发给员工，设法让他们选择更健康的生活方式——如果公司负责员工医疗保险的话，这个目标从财务上来说是有价值的。例如，英国石油公司(BP)向北美员工发放Fitbit可穿戴设备，如果他们完成了活动目标，还会给予他们奖励。实际上，按照Fitbit的IPO招股说明书所示，该公司的5个战略目标之一是“进一步渗透企业福利市场”。可穿戴设备也可能是直接的工具。

But the bigger prize is to use the data from such devices to make the workforce¹⁴ safer or more productive. Some warehouse¹⁵ workers already wear wristbands or headsets that measure their productivity and location in real-time.

但更大的作用是利用此类设备获得的数据来让工作场所变得更安全或者提高生产效率。一些货仓工人已经戴上腕带或耳机来衡量他们的工作效率和进行实时定位。

Kronos, the “workforce management” company whose customers include Apple, Starbucks and Ikea, makes annual revenues of more than $1bn by selling scheduling and real-time data tools that minimise salary bills and maximise productivity. Brenda Morris, who runs Kronos’s UK business, says the company sees applications for wearables in blue and white collar work.

Kronos是一家“工作场所管理”公司，它的客户包括苹果(Apple)、星巴克(Starbucks)和宜家(Ikea)，销售可以最小化薪资成本和最大化生产效率的排班和实时数据工具，年收入超过10亿美元。Kronos英国业务主管布伦达•莫里斯(Brenda Morris)表示，该公司看到在蓝领和白领职员身上应用可穿戴设备很有效。

“If you’re monitoring where people are, what their stress levels are, what their fatigue¹⁶ levels are . . .[that’s] really important when operating machinery . . . Or [in an office] you can see that person’s getting stressed because they’ve been working on that legal contract for too many hours and they don’t have enough support.”

“如果你在监控人们所处位置、他们的压力水平，以及他们的疲劳程度……在操作机器时，（这）真的非常重要……或者（在办公室），你可以看到某个人因长时间研究法律合同，而且没有获得足够支持而变得焦虑不堪”。

Chris Brauer, a senior lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, who runs experiments with workplace wearables, predicts a future in which managers have dashboards showing real-time employee biometrics such as sleep quality that are leading indicators¹⁸ for performance. “It becomes a predictive tool and possibly also a prescriptive one.”

伦敦大学金史密斯学院(Goldsmiths, University of London)高级讲师克里斯•布劳尔(Chris Brauer)负责有关工作场所可穿戴设备的试验，他预计未来经理们将会用仪表盘显示员工睡眠质量等实时生物指标，这些是预示业绩表现的先行指标。“它会成为一种预测性工具，可能也会成为一种规定性的工具”。

But that vision is a long way off — and there are a number of practical, legal and ethical¹⁹ hurdles²⁰ in the way.

但这一设想距离实现还有很长的路要走，面临着许多实践、法律和道德方面的障碍。

First, no one seems to have worked out yet how to analyse or draw useful conclusions from wearables data. Profusion plans to do more trials in larger companies, overlaying the personal metrics with workplace performance data. But so far, the experience of Rob Symes, co-founder of a London start-up called The Outside View, is typical. He tracked all his employees with wearables last year, only to realise: “Right, I’ve got all this data, what the hell does it mean?”

首先，似乎还没有人研究出，如何对可穿戴设备产生的数据进行分析，或者如何从中得出有用的结论。Profusion计划在较大型公司开展更多试验，将个人指标和整体工作场所业绩表现数据叠加起来。但到目前为止，通常会看到的情况是伦敦初创公司The Outside View的联合创始人罗布•赛姆斯(Rob Symes)的经历。去年他利用可穿戴设备追踪了所有员工，最后意识到：“好吧，我掌握了所有数据，但这些数据到底意味着什么？”

Meanwhile, wearable devices crossing over corporate “digital perimeters²¹” every day are an obvious target for hackers²², says Dave Palmer, who spent 13 years at GCHQ and MI5 before joining cyber security company Darktrace as head of technology. “You might think that’s a bit alarmist — what are the chances of my watch or heartrate monitor getting hacked²³ — but this idea of the ‘internet of things’ is racing²⁴ farther ahead in terms of functionality than in terms of security.”

另一方面，每天穿越企业“数据边界”的可穿戴设备明显会成为黑客的目标，在英国政府通信总部(GCHQ)和军情五处(MI5)工作13年后加入网络安全公司Darktrace担任技术主管的戴夫•帕尔马(Dave Palmer)表示。“你可能会认为这有点危言耸听——我的手表或者心率监测器被黑客入侵的几率能有多大呢——但‘物联网’这个概念在功能性方面已经走在了安全性的前面。”

The gadgets are also easy to game. Adam Miller’s employer gives him cash rewards if his Fitbit shows he has taken a certain number of steps a day. But it registers “steps” when jolted²⁵, so if he has not met his daily target, “I might watch TV and wave my arm around . . . or my kids will grab it and start shaking it to see what the numbers get to.”

这些小玩意也很容易糊弄。对于亚当•米勒(Adam Miller)来说，如果Fitbit显示他一天走到了一定的步数，他的雇主就会给予他现金奖励。但Fitbit是在摇晃的情况下记录“步数”的。因此如果米勒没有完成每日的目标，“我可能一边看电视一边挥舞我的手臂……或者我的孩子们会抓着它摇晃，看上面的数字会到多少。”

For Dane Atkinson, chief executive of tech company Sumall, this highlights a serious problem with workplace metrics. “It has a law of physics — as soon as people know it’s being observed it changes the outcome.” His solution as a young CEO was to come up with a secret metric his employees did not know about: he tracked the volume and length of their work emails, which he found a surprisingly good indicator¹⁷ of who was in “professional distress²⁶”.

科技公司Sumall的首席执行官戴恩•阿特金森(Dane Atkinson)认为，这凸显了工作场所指标存在的一个严重问题。“这其中存在物理法则——一旦人们知道一个指标在被观测，结果就会改变。”作为一名年轻的首席执行官，阿特金森的解决方案是提出一个他的员工不知道的秘密指标：追踪员工工作邮件的数量和长度，他发现在显示谁处于“职业困难期”方面，这种指标效果好得惊人。

“I was struggling with empathy . . . the data really helped me catch up,” he says. “In watching those patterns I could start a conversation and say, hey, what’s going on, and there was almost always a huge unload.”

“我之前难以对员工感同身受……数据的确帮助我弥补了这一点，”他说，“看到那些情况后，我就可以与员工交谈，并且对员工说，嗨，怎么了，几乎总是会听到大量倾诉的话语。”

He thinks it is reasonable for an employer to monitor work emails, “but there’s a moral line that’s not been navigated²⁷ by public conversation yet”.

他认为雇主监视工作邮件是合理的，“但这其中有一条道德的界线，公共舆论还没有找到这条线的位置。”

The legal line has not been navigated yet, either. Lawyers say companies would have to gain the explicit²⁸ informed consent of employees before gathering personal data from wearables — and further consent to correlate it with other data, such as performance metrics.

法律的界线也还没有确定。律师们表示，企业通过可穿戴设备收集个人数据前，应该在员工知情的情况下取得员工的明确同意——在将这些数据与工作表现指标等其他数据进行关联前，还要进一步取得员工的同意。

Even then, there is a risk employees would feel implicit²⁹ pressure to agree, says Daniel Cooper, head of the data privacy team at the law firm Covington.

科文顿•柏灵律师事务所(Covington and Burling)数据隐私小组主管丹尼尔•库珀(Daniel Cooper)表示，即使如此，还存在员工因感到隐性压力而勉强同意的可能性。

“Historically European regulators in the data protection area have been very sceptical you can ever get a valid³⁰ employee consent — they feel that for existing employees, [the relationship] is almost inherently coercive.”

“欧洲在数据保护领域的监管机构历来对此抱着非常怀疑的态度，认为你根本得不到切实的员工同意——他们觉得对于现有员工来说，（雇佣关系）几乎有一种固有的强制性。”

How many workers would say yes, uncoerced, and under what conditions? PwC asked 2,000 people recently: 40 per cent said they would wear a workplace wearable, rising to just over half if they knew it would be used to improve their wellbeing at work.

在不强制的情况下，有多少员工会同意，又需要什么条件呢？普华永道(PwC)最近询问了2000人：有40%的人表示他们会佩戴工作场所可穿戴设备。如果他们知道这将用于改善他们的工作状况，这个比例会提高到略高于一半。

Employers and employees might share the same goals (less stress in the workplace, say) but then again, they might not. Many of those who said “no way” did not trust their employer not to use the data against them. A promise to anonymise the data and only analyse them in aggregated³¹ form would help win people over, PwC found.

雇主和员工或许有一些相同的目标（比如降低工作压力），但他们也可能意见相左。许多回答“不行”的人不相信雇主不会用这些数据来针对他们。普华永道发现，匿名收集数据，只从整体上分析数据的承诺有助于争取人们的支持。

For Mike Weston of Profusion, the reaction of his staff to their wearables experiment was as interesting as the data it produced. Some found it enlightening and useful, while others found it “quite disturbing.” One ended up “the most stressed I’ve ever seen her”.

对于Profusion公司的迈克•韦斯顿来说，员工对可穿戴设备试验的反应和试验产生的数据一样有趣。一些人觉得可穿戴设备很有用，富有启发性，另一些人则认为这些设备“相当令人烦恼”。其中有一个人到最后变成一副“我认识她以来最焦虑的样子”。

As for him? “I still don’t know if I love it, but I haven’t taken it off.”

他本人怎么看？“我还不知道自己是否喜欢可穿戴设备，不过我没把它脱下来。”