To consumers, wearable tech is often seen as an addition to the realms of active sports, such as fitness trackers; smartphone accessories, such as smart watches; or just plain fun, and sometimes expensive, tech toys. However, to businesses, wearable tech is making serious inroads toward affecting many industries such as manufacturing, construction, and medicine.

Manatee Works Inc., a barcode scanning integration company, announced that it has made its Barcode Scanner software development kit available for integration with Google (News - Alert) Glass. The company's announcement specifically mentions that the SDK relies on years of development in the barcode scanning field that utilizes symbology recognition and decoding experience. In short, it is not simple tech, and all the advancements in that field, the company says, are now able to affect specific markets such as package handling, personnel tracking, and distribution.

Jim Stein, founder and CEO of Manatee Works, provided a quote in the announcement about how his company looks to align itself with other technologies, and about his excitement for further development.

"As a market leader, we continue to look for opportunities to innovate the barcode scanning experience so that it aligns with emerging trends and technologies, like Google Glass," Stein said. "We are enabling an entirely new mechanism for wearable devices and we're excited to see developers adopting and creating applications for enterprise solutions utilizing hands-free interactive capabilities."

In the shipping and distribution industries alone, many employees have long relied on identifying items by sight, and their companies have paid dearly in inefficiencies caused by that flawed methodology. When those companies move to mobile barcode scanners, such devices often required partial use of employees' hands, so employees still cannot truly operate with full use of their hands and fingers. Manatee technology allows Google Glass to scan products quickly by placing a product within the Glass' viewfinder. This allows employees to benefit, at the very least, from full use of their hands to handle packages and process goods.

The Manatee technology can recognize more than 40 major code symbologies and can operate on Android, iOS, Windows Phone (News - Alert), and other major operating systems. That sort of universality should make the product able to sync with many devices across any business's operations alongside the newest addition of its Google Glass integration.