Project Status
- Figure 1 - Overview of project planning
As it can be seen in the Figure 1, the wearIT@work project starts its last phase. This planning for the last phase aims for ambitious innovation related developments.
The base of the planning are overlapping project phases each running for two years. These project phases start implementing innovative prototypes (technology evaluations) identified analysing mock ups of the predecessor phase. These prototypes deal with NON TRIVIAL open questions that require an experimental study using some sort of real, implemented system.
The innovative prototype work package follows an approach shown on the right hand side of the Figure 2.
- Figure 2 - wearIT innovation implementation strategy
It will first determine what systems or system components are best suited to perform the corresponding experiments. A functional prototype will be implemented and evaluated. This prototype will be introduced as a kind of COTS (Commercial-off-the shelf) component (left hand side of Figure 2) to the demonstrator of the next phase.
In this way two kinds of demonstrators will be developed during the first three phases:
- Isolated demonstrators of non trivial wearable computing components / solutions;
- Scientific advanced system pilots including the wearable computing platform and framework.
Each phase ends based on demonstrators evaluated by the pilot users and the technical partners with an external or internal review.
Activity overview and development approaches taken: objectives
As shown in Figure 1, in month 36 the second ‘System Prototype Phase’ has been finished and the work for the last phase concentrates on definition and implementation of the 3rd generation pilots of the ‘Industrial Prototype’ phase and on dissemination and exploitation issues. The take-up projects have been successfully started. 3rd generation innovative experiments will start and results will be integrated to the packaged wearable platform if feasible. Awareness and exploitation of the efforts will be done in the project.
Scientific objectives
- Develop with the end users appropriate next generation tools for personal empowerment and avoid misuse due to a wrong understanding of computer supported work.
- Classify with the end users the acceptable level of assistance under different working contexts. Not all communication channels may be necessary or appropriate, for either input or output.
- Develop with the end users methods on how context, situations, and other information can be used to support single workers or teams, and how this information has to be presented.
- Generalise with the end users the form of the assistance towards generic mechanisms covering classes of use cases.
- Derive with the end users new mobile/wearable system architecture concepts from the requirements of the four pilot applications and the results of the technology development activity line.
Technical objectives
- Design hardware for personal assistants running on wearable computers.
- Select user interaction methods and appropriate input-output devices in accordance with the requirements of the pilot scenarios.
- Analyse methods to identify the current context of the workers.
- Design a middleware that is suitable to support the worker with context driven information about his task and allows accessing the company information systems related.
- Demonstrate the concept found in show cases related to the system demonstrator pilots
Economic and social objectives
- Utilise the show cases implemented as a demonstrator to interested potential industrial users.
- Help to improve the standards in human-centred design of interaction
- Investigate what could be turned into commercial products.
- Raise the industrial demand in leading edge products building upon wearable computer solutions.
- Investigate the physical closeness between human and computer caused by the pro-active autonomous activity of a wearable computing system parallel to the human workers activities. The resulting new relationship between human and machine has to be evaluated with respect to their risks, possibilities, and implications.
