Wearables promised fewer slips. What the evidence actually shows.
A 12-week pilot can't tell you whether a sensor works, because the attention around the pilot moves the numbers as much as the device does.
Sensor wearables, posture monitors, proximity tags, fatigue trackers, are among the fastest-moving categories in safety tech. The pitch is intuitive: measure the risky movement, nudge the worker, prevent the injury. The demo comes with a pilot result: incidents down, posture scores up, everyone impressed.
The harder question is whether that result is the device working, or the well-documented effect of any program in which people know they’re being watched and supported.
The pilot problem
NIOSH and others have flagged the difficulty of evaluating emerging sensor technologies, and the evaluation problem is well understood: short pilots, motivated volunteers, and concentrated management attention all push outcomes in the same favourable direction, independent of the hardware. A twelve-week trial with the safety team hovering is close to the ideal conditions for any intervention to look good. Strap on a placebo and you might see the numbers move too.
That doesn’t mean wearables don’t work. It means a pilot designed to sell one can’t tell you whether they do. The measured effect you care about is the device’s marginal contribution, what it adds beyond the attention, coaching, and Hawthorne glow that came free with the pilot.
Before you scale a pilot
Ask the vendor for the control condition: what happened to a comparable crew that received the same attention and coaching but no device? If there wasn't one, you measured a program, not a product, and a program is far cheaper to run than a per-worker hardware lease.
The technology may well earn its place; sensing is genuinely improving. But the burden of proof sits with the isolated device effect, measured against a fair comparison, not with a pilot engineered to flatter it. Buy the evidence, not the enthusiasm.