Victor Hernandez will devote eight months to exploring the impact of wearable technology on newsrooms as a 2015-2016 nonresidential fellow at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute. His research is intended to lay a foundation for future testing and experimentation. Hernandez plans to partner with local and national news organizations to experiment with the technology and study potential journalistic applications.

The goal of the partnerships is to arrive at a reasonable consensus regarding effective features and applications for journalism, illustrate effective use case examples, gather critical user feedback on suggested application and workflow improvements, and identify any hardware/software opportunities not yet available, Hernandez says. Hernandez will also seek help from faculty members and students at the Missouri School of Journalism in his testing and research.

He sees the exploration process as an opportunity to share feedback and suggestions with smartwatch developers.

During the fellowship Hernandez and his team will be developing what he’s calling a wearables playbook, with recommended equipment, best practices, approaches to workflow, recommendations for future technology, and case studies.