The days of rushing into a shop to quickly get a carton of milk are long gone. Retailers now want to monitor every aspect of your visit to their businesses, including your buying patterns, geographic location, and even your heart rate.
A “biometric feedback cart handle” that could track a shopper’s pulse rate, body temperature, pace, and amount of force applied to the handle as they go around a store is what Walmart is attempting to patent.
Walmart’s handle device the “biometric feedback cart handle which was initially seen by Motherboard, measures the shopper’s “baseline” biometric data before continuing to track all movement and sending that data to a centralized server.
A shop assistant would receive a notification from the central server to go help the customer if it showed that the consumer was “not satisfied.”
According to CBInsights, who cited the same patent filing, Walmart might also make use of this data to determine how stressed out a customer is.
It explains: “It would combine these factors with contextual information to determine whether an alert is warranted. If the person is in a particularly crowded department, for instance, it would factor that in when assessing a rise in stress levels, knowing that some increase is likely based on the circumstance.”
However, something like this might find as frightening or at the minimum, confusing.
Does Walmart intend to notify customers before using these biometric feedback cart handles? Does it intend to match the shopper at checkout with the data collected? And lastly, what happens to this data after it has been gathered?
It’s another indication that retail is evolving, for Walmart, which is investing in blockchain to track food suppliers, is now patented technology to spy on customers in stores.
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