Automation and personalization sound like opposites, but they don’t have to be mutually exclusive. And the landscape of their Venn Diagram overlap is an important issue on its own, but also for Wellness.
On one hand, the need to create scalability requires programs and code and impersonal logic. On the other, the ultimate audience for wellness programming (to be effective, anyway) are people who need a human element — the person-to-person interaction, a knee-to-knee conversation or simple eye contact and understanding that are critical to impact human behavior.
The key I think is to use the technology as a means, and not the end itself. For example, wearable tech — if that’s all you have your fitness approach — is insufficient because provides no more than just a digital readout. One big “huh, yeah, look at that.” The same is true for biometric screening programs that provide an overwhelming actuarial table of numbers back to employees.
Cool tech gadgetry is so fun and frankly magical that we forget that it’s just a tool. However, it cannot be the END, but only the means to that end in which a person takes those data, considers them in the context of circumstance, environment, personality, family, etc., and then makes a subjective recommendation based on the objective data.
