Supporting mobile workers in car production by wearable computing — Applied context detection

Today´s requirements in production process efficiency combined with their increasing complexity represent a great challenge for staff members at all levels (from the assembly worker to the plant manager). The ultimate goal is the fine-tuning of the production process to perfectly fulfil customer orders and to keep the overall efficiency at high levels. Through scenarios based on real situations, and tested in a real industrial environment (a Skoda car manufacturing production plant), the wearIT@work project demonstrates how wearable technology can allow an efficient, successful working environment by providing ubiquitous, mobile access to production process-related information where and when necessary: at the shop floor, at the assembly line, and at the manufacturing workstations. This allows workers at different levels to improve the training process of inexperienced workers, to improve availability of information, to speed up localisation and detection of areas to be repaired or maintained as well as to improve communication and knowledge sharing. This paper describes the used context detection techniques, which are used to support mobile workers in car production by wearable technologies.