The two may prove to be more than just a buzzword and a legal industry; in fact, wearable tech and personal injury law could fast become unlikely partners in crime. How? By using wearable technology to prove a client’s personal injury claim. In other words: technology might just win a whole heck of alot more cases in law, backed by sheer data.
Unconvinced of the likelihood of tech pervading evidence at trial? You don’t have to be, because it’s already happened. Extracting data from wearables to use as evidence in a personal injury case has been going on as early as 2014.
Lawyers to a woman who suffered “drastic lifestyle changes” as the result of a car accident submitted the woman’s Fitbit as proof that her lifestyle did, indeed, reflect major changes. The data extracted was able to show the woman’s activity levels before her accident, as well as how much activity levels decreased after her accident.
Data is data, no matter how it’s obtained, and in the eyes of the court, data elicited from wearable tech is as admissible in session as any other shred of physical evidence. And with the types of data that can be mined by wearables now, personal injury lawyers have plenty of data evidence to choose from; from deterioration in health to altered eating habits and even how much sleep one gains or loses, pre-accident data and post-accident data is plenty.
Adding fuel to the great wearable-tech-in-law debate is Canadian company, Vivametrica. Established in 2013, Vivametrica traditionally collects and analyzes activity data for healthcare providers and employers.
Their most recent endeavor, however, has seen the company launch a new service for personal injury lawyers, were quantified data from the Vivametrica device-agnostic platform “compares client’s steps per day against normal population data to help lawyers assess clients and determine whether to take them on.” (mobihealthnews.com)
CEO, Dr. Robert Hu, says the service is meant as a tool for lawyers to assess potential clients early into a case or before the case is accepted. Dr. Hu also hopes that the ability for lawyers to assess client information based on wearable tech data will eventually translate into courtroom-use, where he says the current status quo is “he-said, she-said” child’s play.
The potential to introduce a solid means of extracting hard data-driven evidence is real with the emergence of technology in law, and more specifically with startups like Dr, Hu’s that focus on trying to flesh out a client’s claim with data evidence,
The elephant in the room, though? The probability of wearable tech abuse. Concerns raised by government officials over the integrity of the data being submitted is not without validation, as it would be easy to counterfeit data to show either over activity or underactivity. There is no real way to show who is using a wearable device at what time, nor is it possible to determine if a client simply isn’t logging activity to fake injury.
But as is the nature of personal injury law, the he-said, she-said status quo may never entirely disappear. Introducing wearable tech as evidence, however, could significantly help change it, and eventually, maybe even get rid of it all together depending upon how the future of wearable tech develops.
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