“WearIT@work” - Wearable Computing

Empowering the mobile worker through wearable computing

WearIT@work is an integrated European project with 36 partners from academic and industrial institutes. It aims to raise the professional mobile worker to higher levels of productivity by providing more seamless and effective forms of access to knowledge at the point of work, collaboration, and communication.

Scope: Mobile work

• is performed outside offices
• can take place at different locations
• requires communication and access to online knowledge
• binds the primary task and user’s attention to the physical world
• is performed by professionals

Wearable mobile computing empowers professionals to higher levels of productivity. It provides effective forms of access to knowledge and computing power anywhere and in any situation.
The new technology paradigm meets the growing demand on European professionals to become more flexible and efficient in an increasingly challenging work environment. Wearable computing will improve productivity because it allows workers to complete more complex tasks in less time and with less effort. WearIT@work will develop a core technology in Europe’s transition to a service-centered economy—as a result of which new jobs and economic growth in Europe will be generated. Europe should take the lead in exploiting this unique potential of job creation, job enhancement, and economic growth. Because the mobile computing solutions of today are still too complex, obtrusive, and demanding on the user to be seamlessly integrated into complex work processes, their usability in industrial scenarios and acceptance by the workers is still limited.

WearIT@work takes the next important step of innovation: It will develop a new paradigm of wearable mobile computing that supports complex tasks with a minimum of human-machine interaction and thereby enables mobile professionals to keep their attention focused on the interaction with the work environment. A new software and hardware platform will be created in which professionals can be mobile and at the same time fully integrated into the surrounding IT infrastructure.

The feasibility of the WearIT@work approach will be tested in a set of real-world pilot applications. In a closed feedback-loop, experiences will be used to optimize methods and tools and demonstrate the usability of wearable mobile computing in industrial settings.

The contribution of the European Microsoft Innovation Center (EMIC):

The European Microsoft Innovation Center (EMIC) leads the design of the next-generation, device-side, information integration framework that allows mobile worker applications to interact better with environmental contextual information (like user activity, location, health parameters, and smart objects) and also improves mobile application communications capabilities.

Dealing with contextual information proved to be a crucial property because context is the key that enables applications to adapt to a user’s needs unobtrusively. Being able to collect context information collaboratively in a uniform way and deriving new information from the available data is a key requirement.
There are three stakeholders: the application programmer wanting to use contextual data, the system designer who wants to provide contextual data, and the workers who want “smart” applications.

The new technology will have a long-term impact on the organization of individual and collaborative work and create new ways to organize work. The feasibility of the WearIT@work approach will be tested in a set of real-world pilot applications. In a closed feedback-loop, experiences made in the pilots will be used to optimize methods and tools and prove the usability of wearable mobile computing in industrial settings.

The contribution of the European Microsoft Innovation Center (EMIC) in this area is a ContextFramework that enables application writers to integrate contextual information into their applications easily. The first version of this framework has been implemented and is currently being evaluated in realistic scenarios defined in the project.

The current demonstrator is monitoring health and environmental parameters of firefighters during a training incident. It will allow a quick evaluation of the situation at the incident commander’s post.

Key industrial partners include Siemens (with their c-labs organization), Zeiss, Thales, SAP, and HP. Academic and research institutions include: TZI/University of Bremen, ETH, Fraunhofer, and ENEA (Italy).

For more information, visit the project’s Web site at:
http://www.wearitatwork.com