Michael Lawo

WearIT@work: Toward Real-World Industrial Wearable Computing

Wearable computers are often cited as an enabling technology for out-of-office applications. In fact, there has been a considerable amount of work on industrial applications of wearables. However, with the notable exception of the symbol arm-worn system, this research has had little impact on industrial practice. The wearIT@work project is a 4 1/2-year effort financed by the European Union and aimed at facilitating real-life industrial deployment of wearable technology. The project is at the end of its third year. With 42 partners and a project funding of 23.7 million Euro (half of which comes from the EU), this consortium is the largest civilian wearable-computing effort worldwide. We are organizing the project around four pilot applications - aircraft maintenance, car production, healthcare, and emergency response - that drive the work in a bottom-up, user-centered approach.

An empirical task analysis of warehouse order picking using head-mounted displays

Evaluations of task guidance systems often focus on evaluations of new technologies rather than comparing the nuances of interaction across the various systems. One common domain for task guidance systems is warehouse order picking. We present a method involving an easily reproducible ecologically motivated order picking environment for quantitative user studies designed to reveal differences in interactions. Using this environment, we perform a 12 participant within-subjects experiment demonstrating the advantages of a head-mounted display based picking chart over a traditional text-based pick list, a paper-based graphical pick chart, and a mobile pick-by-voice system. The test environment proved sufficiently sensitive, showing statistically significant results along several metrics with the head-mounted display system performing the best. We also provide a detailed analysis of the strategies adopted by our participants.

The future of mobile computing: R&D activities in the state of Bremen

Purpose – The paper aims to report on the future of mobile computing and R&D activities in the state of Bremen.Design/methodology/approach – The Mobile Research Center in Bremen, Germany, provides results from interdisciplinary scientific research for the creation of economic value by partners from industry.Findings – The paper finds that, through the MRC and its partners, a national and international brand is being developed with respect to excellent research and to the transfer of research in the area of mobile solutions.Originality/value – This paper outlines technology and research activities in Bremen, which promotes itself as the mobile city, a trademark standing for innovation and supporting in innovative ways the necessary structural changes in the economy. It will be of interest to those in the field of R&D.

Using wearable computing solutions in real-world applications

In this paper we report on the wearIT@work project. With the wearIT@work project the European Commission and 42 partners from 16 countries invested into a new technology empowering mobile workers. The first 42 months of this project are over and industrial demonstrators, evaluations and results and an exploitation strategy are available. Beside the four application domains of maintenance, production, healthcare and emergency response further domains like cultural heritage, a rural living lab for the prevention of environmental disasters and eInclusion are first extensions to new application domains. In this paper based on the results of the third development cycle of the project results and an approach of the exploitation strategy are presented.

The Open Wearable Computing Group

Between 2004 and 2009, the European Commission and 42 partners from 16 countries invested about 24 million Euros to empower mobile workers through the wearIT@work project. In addition to maintenance, production, healthcare, and emergency response, new application domains targeted included cultural heritage, a rural living lab for the prevention of environmental disasters, and wearable computing assistance for visually impaired persons. Industrial demonstrators, evaluations results, and an exploitation strategy were developed and published in a technology repository that indicates the maturity levels of the different components.

Monte-Carlo Tree Search for Logistics

In this paper we review recent advances of randomized AI search in solving industrially relevant optimization problems. The method we focus on is a sampling-based solution mechanism called Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), which is extended by the concepts of nestedness and policy adaptation to establish a better trade-off between exploitation and exploration. This method, originating in game playing research, is a general heuristic search technique, for which often less problem-specific knowledge has to be added than in comparable approaches.

Creative design for inclusion using virtual user models

The development of products that are accessible to the largest possible group of users can be regarded as a major challenge for manufacturers of consumer products. It is therefore crucial, that the product development process is supported by practical methods and tools that can help incorporate these essential human factors in early phases of the development process. Ergonomics evaluation and user testing with real users are user centred design methodologies often conducted by companies that are not only complex, but can be very time and cost-intensive. As an alternative approach virtual user models (VUM) have been proposed for supporting the early phases of the product development process. In this paper we will present the model-based design approach of the European research project VICON supporting inclusive design of consumer products particularly at the early stages of product development.

Supporting Inclusive Design of Mobile Devices with a Context Model

The aim of inclusive product design is to successfully integrate a broad range of diverse human factors in the product development process with the intention of making products accessible to and usable by the largest possible group of users (Kirisci, Thoben et al. 2011). However, the main barriers for adopting inclusive product design include technical complexity, lack of time, lack of knowledge and techniques, and lack of guidelines (Goodman, Dong et al. 2006), (Kirisci, Klein et al. 2011). Although manufacturers of consumer products are nowadays more likely to invest efforts in user studies, consumer products in general only nominally fulfill, if at all, the accessibility requirements of as many users as they potentially could. The main reason is that any user-centered design prototyping or testing aiming to incorporate real user input, is often done at a rather late stage of the product development process. Thus, the more progressed a product design has evolved the more time-consuming and costly it will be to alter the design (Zitkus, Langdon et al. 2011). This is increasingly the case for contemporary mobile devices such as mobile phones or remote controls.

Supporting inclusive design of user interfaces with a virtual user model

The aim of inclusive design is to successfully integrate human factors in the product development process with the intention of making products accessible for the largest possible group of users. In order to meet this challenge, the involvement of human users has so far been an efficient approach. Yet, such ergonomics evaluation experiments that employ a versatility of user groups can be very time and cost-intensive. Therefore, virtual user models (VUM) have been proposed for supporting certain phases of the product development process. In this paper a model-based design approach is proposed, which supports inclusive design of physical user interfaces of consumer products at the early stages of product development. Accordingly the objective is to explore how virtual user models can be used to conceptualize user interfaces of consumer products in such a way that even the needs of users with physical impairments are fully considered.

An industrial case study on wearable computing applications

Wearable computing means a paradigm shift: instead of working at the computer users are supported by computing systems in their primary tasks. Currently wearable computing is still a technology of niches and in a laboratory stage. However, with wearIT@work a project dedicated to applications was launched by the European Commission (EC IP 004216). The first 30 months of this project are over and industrial demonstrators, evaluations and results are available. In this paper we present results from industrial case studies in two of the four application domains, namely production and maintenance, with a newly designed wearable user interface.