"WearIT@work" - Wearable Computing

Empowering the mobile worker through wearable computing

WearIT@work was an integrated European project with 36 partners from academic and industrial institutes (Jun 04 – May 09). It aimed 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 improves productivity because it allows workers to complete more complex tasks in less time and with less effort. WearIT@work developed a core technology in Europe’s transition to a service-centered economy—as a result of which new jobs and economic growth in Europe were 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 were 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 was still limited.

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

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

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

The European Microsoft Innovation Center (EMIC) lead 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 improved 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 was a key requirement.
There were three stakeholders: the application programmer wanting to use contextual data, the system designer who wanted to provide contextual data, and the workers who wanted “smart” applications.

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

The contribution of the European Microsoft Innovation Center (EMIC) in this area was a Context Framework that enables application writers to integrate contextual information into their applications easily.

Demonstrators were monitoring health and environmental parameters of firefighters during a training incident to allow a quick evaluation of the situation at the incident commander’s post.

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

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