Empowering the mobile worker by wearable computing

Action Line: Applications and services for the mobile user and worker

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 the transition of the European economy to a service-centred 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, too obtrusive, and too demanding on the user to be seamlessly integrated into complex work-processes, their usability in industrial scenarios and their acceptance by the workers is still limited. wearIT@work takes the next important step of innovation: it will develop a new paradigm for 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 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 close feedback-loop, experiences made in the pilots will be used to optimise methods and tools and to prove the usability of wearable mobile computing in industrial settings.

RCN: 71921
Last updated: 2004-10-22