Big Brother is smartwatching you: China's workers monitored by wearable tech

This is how a street cleaner in one Chinese city introduced a new piece of surveillance equipment that the local sanitation company slapped on her wrist to track her work. The smartwatch doesn’t just track her position. Staying 20 minutes in one place sounds an alarm: “Add oil!” the watch chants, using a popular Chinese phrase of encouragement.

Sanitation workers in Nanjing’s Hexi district are now required to wear GPS-equipped smartwatches, according to a local report aired on Jiangsu City Channel. These watches track what time workers clock in, whether they leave their designated work area and, most importantly, whether they are slacking off.

The idea is not entirely new. A city in India implemented the same technology for its own sanitation workers last year. Ecommerce platforms in China have been selling similar products for monitoring “lazy” workers such as office ID cards equipped with voice recording and GPS tracking.