Maintenance Scenario

Interaction and usability aspects of software systems have become critical software quality measures. Today, more attention is paid to a proper user interface design and its seamless integration into the general software development process.
A major challenge here, however, is to support software engineers that are usually not familiar with the latest HCI knowledge, with tools and processes that allow them to build “good” applications.
When considering applications for wearable computers many challenges, different to traditional desktop applications, arise. For instance, understanding interaction design or the appropriate use of sensor-based context information are two critical factors that decide whether or not wearable computing will ever hit the market in the nearer future. In particular, this is because the usability of an application (which is closely related to performance measures) is getting more important and may even overweight cost measures of industrial applications. One of the first comprehensive reports on the design of a wearable computer including its application is described in. Although wearable computing has not yet reached the market, research has proposed a few demo applications for different domains. For example, an application that supports crane maintenance was developed. For this, a combination of a visual interface that can be operated with a data glove device was proposed. In a similar concept was used to support aircraft technicians. Besides this maintenance related application examples, there are also others.
As already identified at the beginning of the project, in aircraft maintenance there are basically three different scenarios where wearable computing applications can empower maintenance workers: (1) Removal and Installation, (2) Inspection, (3) Trouble Shooting. In this section we report on the development of an aircraft maintenance application in the removal and installation area. In particular, the application supports the removal and installation procedure of passenger seats in the cabin of an aircraft. The focus will be on the overall process and tools used by application developers to implement the actual application as well as the way user studies where integrated to support the development process and particularly the user interface development.