Wearables for Work

HANK HOGAN, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR, hank.hogan@photonics.com

While consumer goods such as smart watches and glasses attract attention, demand for wearable computing devices for enterprise, industrial and professional applications is also growing. Because such devices are connected computers, they enable users to carry a PC or tablet around while interacting with it hands-free. Therefore, they could benefit factory and logistics workers who need real-time data but cannot readily consult a tablet. Medical professionals and maintenance personnel could likewise use the information a wearable provides.

Thanks to connected wearable computers, technicians and professionals can receive detailed instructions on complicated tasks, including time-saving and quality-enhancing checklists. Courtesy of Vital Enterprises Software.

“We expect wearables to have a strong presence within certain industries [such as] field services, logistics, maintenance and energy industries. These are primarily desk-less workers,” said James Moar, a senior analyst with Basingstoke, England-based Juniper Research Ltd.

Resolution, size trade-offs

Such industrial and professional wearables, however, need suitable displays and may have to work in cold, hot, noisy, dirty and possibly water-logged environments while being comfortable, offering value and providing performance. If a display is involved — which is likely to be the case in a professional or industrial setting — it will impact its specifications.

“We believe display resolution should be just adequate for the applications since a higher-resolution display and larger field of view typically require a bigger size, higher power consumption and higher cost. A smaller display module with low power consumption will allow the headset to be smaller, more fashionable and comfortable,” said Hong Choi, chief technology officer for display maker Kopin Corp. of Westborough, Mass.

The company provides microdisplays, display modules, chips and software to a variety of enterprise wearable manufacturers. In such settings, increasing worker productivity is of paramount importance, which usually means that operation must be hands-free. The best input option is voice, but often the environment can be quite noisy, Choi said. Thus, Kopin offers its own technology, which Choi said has a better than 95 percent speech-recognition reliability, even in noisy industrial applications.

Users look around these opaque displays to see the task at hand. Courtesy of Kopin.

For wearable displays, there are two basic options. One is see-through or transparent — the type found in smart glasses from Google, Microsoft and others. The other choice is opaque or see-around, small displays that are placed near the eye. The see-through technique is the more power hungry of the two. The optics are not power efficient and anything on the display must be bright enough to be seen even in intense ambient light, Choi said.

Surgeons use Microsoft HoloLens in a conference about heart surgery planning, part of an investigation into the use of wearable technology going on at the Intervention Centre at Oslo University Hospital. The image of the heart model is what the doctors see when looking through the transparent display of the wearable. Courtesy of Hanne Kristine Fjellheim, SopraSteria.

He added that in many applications, a display module not in the direct line of sight that can be seen briefly works well enough. A see-around display meets these requirements. If compact, it will not interfere with the ability to see what’s nearby. What’s more, when not needed, the display can be moved to a position where it does not block vision at all.

“What it does is it allows somebody to work and view a computer display at the same time,” said Rob Enderle, principal analyst with the Enderle Group of Bend, Ore., of this approach. Because the opaque display technology is more mature and less costly, it is the technique being used by some enterprise wearable manufacturers.

One such is RealWear Inc., a Milpitas, Calif.-based startup that makes what it says is the first industrial head-mounted tablet. The device is aimed at workers who typically wear hard hats and other protective gear, said Sanjay Jhawar, president and chief product officer.

RealWear Inc.’s HMT-1 is a voice-driven, hands-free, head-mounted tablet for an industrial workforce. Courtesy of RealWear.

“We wanted to make sure whatever we did was compatible with that environment,” he said. “There are a lot of safety considerations. One of them that is very key is the maintenance of situational awareness and your peripheral vision.”

Jhawar noted that this means the line of sight must be unobstructed and hearing unimpeded. After all, it may be a shouted warning that a crane is moving or a glimpse of it that could save a worker from injury or worse.

In these skilled technical occupations, what is shown is often from a document, and hence what is most typically seen is black text on a white background. Partly because of this, RealWear’s solution features an adjustable microdisplay that emulates a seven-inch mini-tablet screen sitting at about 20 in. — a typical reading distance — from the user. The concept is that of a dashboard — something out of the main line of sight to be glanced at and the information on it quickly comprehended. Head-tracking technology, which Jhawar said was very fluid, allows hands-free access to large documents by enabling users to move around them by shifting where they look.

Because it has an Android 6.0 operating system, the device can run tablet-style augmented reality (AR) applications. Thus, information about a highlighted object could pop up on the display, potentially an important advantage when working on a complicated piece of gear or engaged in an intricate task. There is also a camera and a microphone that can convey what is being seen and heard elsewhere, enabling remote assistance.

Putting the display inside a housing reduced the brightness needed from 2000 nits down to 450, allowing improved contrast and longer battery life. The choice to make the device mountable on a hard hat or supported by an optional head strap brought benefits, such as getting weight off the nose and distributing it around the head, making the wearable much less noticeable to users, Jhawar said.

As for see-through wearable displays, these also are showing up in professional and enterprise settings. Microsoft’s HoloLens, for example, is being used by medical researchers in Oslo, Norway, in an effort to develop better and more precise operation planning. With wearables, there’s the possibility of a team of surgeons seeing each other while interacting with a 3D virtual model during the surgery planning and decision-making process. One hoped-for result is that less healthy tissue would be removed during procedures, leading to better patient outcomes.

Ole Jakob Elle, head of Medical Cybernetics and Image Processing (left), and professor Bjørn Edwin, surgeon, both of The Intervention Centre at Oslo University Hospital, demonstrate augmented reality technology — here showing a picture of how a liver model appears when looking through a Microsoft HoloLens. Courtesy of Hanne Kristine Fjellheim, SopraSteria.

Such innovations illustrate the important point that as the less-mature category, see-through devices benefit greatly when there is a deep-pocketed champion. Such companies have staying power and the money to spend in developing the technology and the supporting ecosystem.

“It always helps to have a market maker in the segment,” Enderle said. “Microsoft is making huge investments here related to the technology.”

What see-through displays offer that the alternative cannot is the possibility of mixed reality. As the name implies, mixed reality merges generated images and data with the real world. In the case of surgery, the virtual (such as an ultrasound image) and real-world content (such as the actual patient) would be combined into one whole during an operation, with the various image elements interacting with each other in real time.

Fast refresh rates

Today, however, this is not feasible. One issue is that the displays have a limited field of view, which is a significant drawback according to Scott Montgomerie, CEO, chief technology officer and co-founder of AR software company Scope AR of San Francisco. “It’s not an ideal AR experience, especially for users new to AR, when the augmentation is cut off and you have to shift your point of view to see the entire augmentation,” he said.

What’s more, the displays must have a fast refresh rate. This also impacts the processing power required to generate the images. Both are a consequence of the need to minimize the lag, or latency, between movement of the user’s head or view and change in the image. The latency should be less than 20 milliseconds to avoid issues for the viewer, according to Kopin’s Choi. Display frame rates of 120 Hz help reduce latency and are needed to stay below the time threshold, he added.

Another hurdle is the brightness of transparent see-through displays, particularly in outdoor situations where ambient light levels can be high. One way to solve this problem is to pump more power through the display, but that chews up battery capacity and thus lessens run time. There could be other ways to tackle these issues. RealWear’s Jhawar said his company is working on a hybrid approach that combines the best of the see-through and opaque methods but did not provide details or a timetable.

Despite these and other challenges, wearables for work are drawing increasing interest. Part of this is due to advances in technology, driven by the development of powerful processors, cameras and other components for mobile devices. These lead to lighter wearables that can run longer on a battery charge, making these devices more useful in a wider array of work settings. Also, wearables can make use of sensors developed for tablets and phones, such as thermal or near-infrared sensors that can plug or be incorporated into a device. These sensors have agricultural, industrial and professional uses.

Most importantly, wearables for work are attracting attention because they promise to pay back investments made in them. For example, Vital Enterprises Software Inc. of San Francisco has a pilot program involving wearables used in satellite assembly at an aerospace company. The results there indicate that having work instructions always a glance away can save 10 percent of technician time. Being able to do remote quality inspections can eliminate 5 percent of work delays, leading to a combined 15 percent boost in worker efficiency.

“We’re equipping technicians with the ability to perform their work more accurately and more efficiently,” said Ash Eldritch, CEO, in summing up the advantages workplace wearables offer.