Wearable Computing Goes Live in Industry

aking dumb places smart is what wearable computing is really about, " says Edward McConaghay, president and chief executive officer of ViA Inc. (www.via-pc.com)— " and bringing knowledge to knowledge workers in the field can provide high returns on investment. " For proof, McConaghay points to the use of connected wearables that let technicians work on expensive capital equipment without running back and forth to distant terminals for critical technical data. Those efficiencies can save labor hours for deployments in shipbuilding and commercial aircraft inspection , while also reducing construction and maintenance times for these large capital projects. As one example, McConaghay cites Bath Iron Works (BIW), a shipbuilder in Bath, Maine, that used ViA's shipyard inspection application to realize an 80-to-1 return on investment over a three-year amortization period. That 8,000-percent return resulted from 70-percent reductions in inspection times, created because connected wearables reduced average information delivery times from two or three hours to about 20 minutes. Reconciliation of design versus the as-built systems and speeding design remediation are also key areas that can yield a high ROI. Motivated by these labor savings and associated schedule efficiencies for their large capital projects, capital-intensive industries are often early adopters of wearable computers. (See the " Early Work " sidebar for a discussion of pioneering experiments in wearable computing and augmented reality at Boeing.) For these wearable applications, McConaghay found that physical form factors and interface technologies play a crucial role. There is such a thing as too small, his customers told him. For example, they found the PDA-style QVGA displays inadequate for many applications. The small PDA screens show diagrams or map details out of context or else give the big picture without readable detail. Both are unsatisfactory for users who need detailed design data. Inadequate resolution even forced some customer organizations to reject VGA displays. Six-to eight-inch tablet-style color displays, with 800 × 600 SVGA resolution , provide a workable middle ground for wearable computers in industrial applications. This size screen will display design drawings, schematics, and documentation in a useful context. Screens larger than eight inches are not casually portable, while those smaller than six inches are not easily readable or lack resolution for the design data industrial knowledge workers need to function effectively. Also, having separate displays, computing cores, and peripherals in wear-able configurations lets industrial users customize system capabilities to meet the demands of the various …