Increasing the Support to Humans in Factory Environments Using a Smart Glove: An Evaluation

Abstract

Humans are an essential part of the manufacturing domain. In factory environments the support to humans can offer benefits. Such benefits can for example be monetary as processes are accelerated, time can be saved. Benefits can also be ergonomic improvements offering hands-free operations during daily tasks. Hands-free operations are of special interest in case both hands are needed during a task. Lifting heavy parts is a typical scenario during commissioning processes that can impede necessary scanning processes. Currently, handheld scanners are used in many industries during commissioning processes. The disadvantage of such scanners is that during the usage, the worker is left with only one free hand. In this publication we conducted a quantitative, qualitative user study, compared three variants during a typical commissioning process. We used a smart textile that integrates the scanning unit into a glove from our project partner, extended it. We developed two smart glove variants in combination with a smartwatch application. One variant offers a semi, the other one a totally hands-free operation during the commissioning process. We compared it to one of the smallest, commercially available scanning handheld devices. Our results show that the developed approaches offer benefits concerning the support to humans, reduce the physical fatigue of the arms, hands, fingers, increase the user acceptance. We show that the time variance while using the smart glove variants is smaller compared to the handheld variant. Also the amount of errors is reduced by 66% percent. The proposed approaches are promising, we are already in contact with partners from the aviation, automotive domain to further improve our proposed variants.