Wearable computers makes a comeback

In the office, you can sit in front of a computer. Out in the field or in a warehouse, that’s not possible — but it is possible to wear one.

“We increased our production by 20 per cent, and our error rate went down to nothing,” said Randy McConnell, IT director at Smith Drug Co. in Spartanburg, S.C. He equipped warehouse workers with wearable computers from Vocollect Inc. in Pittsburgh.

Relaying instructions from a central server, the wearables tell workers what bin to go to and how many items to pull, he explained. The workers then confirm what they’ve done, to maintain accuracy. The waist-mounted computers weigh less than a pound and are curved to fit comfortably on a user’s waist. Plus, each user wears a headset with a microphone.

“Previously, they had a clipboard with 25 items per sheet,” McConnell recalled. “Now, they don’t have to look at the paper, their hands are free, and all they have to do is listen and think. It takes about 30 minutes to train a voice recognition template for one person and no more than 30 minutes to train the person — within one hour, they can be really productive.”

Overall, “wearables represent a niche industrial and government market where freeing one’s hands significantly enhances the capabilities of the user,” said David Krebs, an analyst at Venture Development Corp. in Natick, Mass. “We have seen strong successes in warehouses and some in the military for situational awareness, with some adoption in health care and maintenance. But the big issue in the field is identifying appropriate applications.”

Most wearables use speech for both input and output, he indicated. The reliability of speech recognition for input isn’t a problem, because the voice software is “trained” to recognize a specific user, and the applications generally have vocabularies of less than 100 words, sources said. Typically, the vendors offer multiple language interfaces, and multiple languages are often used inside the same warehouse. The units can last a full shift on a single battery charge, thanks to power optimization, hot-swappable batteries and the absence of a display screen. The units are typically ruggedized, although not always to full military specifications.

Krebs’ figures show the wearable computer field is a $150 million market, counting fully functional wearable PCs but not counting special-purpose wearable processors such as those used in the medical and sports fields, and also not counting conductive textiles. The field is enjoying an annual growth rate of 20 per cent to 25 per cent, Krebs added.

With wearables, “new employees in a warehouse can be got up to speed in a day, since they are continually getting instructions on what to do, as opposed to being trained for a week by following another picker around,” added Scott Yetter, CEO of Voxware Inc., a wearable computer vendor in Lawrenceville, N.J. He said that users can typically expect a reduction in their error rate of 30 per cent to 50 per cent, which may by itself justify the system because shipping the wrong product can be expensive. Productivity usually increases 10% to 20 per cent, because the pickers don’t have to put aside their clipboards, he added.

Tom Kerr, Vocollect’s director of research, said that warehouse applications such as Smith Drugs’ have payback times of one to two years, based on improved productivity and accuracy, but otherwise declined to give a price range for the wearables. “The users can assign a cost to a one-second improvement in order selection speed,” he noted. “The market is growing, and voice is very much a mainstream technology now. As its acceptance grows, we expect to see it adopted more into other industries.”

“In the 1990s you saw people deploying wearables in order to get a competitive advantage, but now you need them to be competitive at all,” said Brian Viscount, vice president at Motorola Inc., which, thanks to its acquisition of Symbol Technologies, is a leading vendor in the wearable field. “For us, it’s mostly a replacement market, but the market is still not saturated, as we see ongoing adoptions in the Far East and as in-aisle devices in retail stores.” Motorola’s 11-ounce unit, based on Windows CE, is worn on the forearm, and also relies on a voice interface. Prices for the units range from $3,000 to $3,500, he said.

Other wearables are carried in backpacks. “Our part of the market is doubling every year,” said Ross Smith, president of Quantum3D Inc. in San Jose, which makes wearables for the military and police markets. His systems are typically used with head-mounted or handheld displays, rather than voice interfaces. The latter are typically used to control tactical robots, smaller examples of which are now also carried in backpacks, he explained.

“A lot of new applications are springing up, just as in any other field where you have an enabling technology, especially around what they call C4ISR: computer control, communications, command information and situational awareness,” he noted. Input is performed through various means, including buttons, joysticks, touch screens and programmable controllers similar to those used in video games, he added.

“What would make wearables more compelling would be for them to move beyond browser-driven behavior and provide information the user wants as the user moves around,” noted Jackie Fenn, an analyst at Gartner Inc. As an example of what could be done, she points not to a wearable computer vendor, but to GeoVector Corp., a San Francisco-based supplier of location-based technology for cell phones.

GeoVector supplies its Mapion software to a phone system in Japan that has put into circulation about 2.5 million cell phones with both GPS and a compass, so the phone knows where it’s located and what direction it’s facing, explained Pamela Kerwin, vice president at the firm.

“You can ‘bookmark’ your car, and your phone will lead you back to it later,” she said. “You can point to an apartment building and find out if there are vacancies there — there are no for-rent signs in Japan. You can select a building from a list, and the phone will lead you to the front of it. The directions are text — no maps are used.” The building locations are drawn from a database, and no image-matching identification is attempted. However, the firm is planning software that will annotate a picture with the name or location of the scene.

But location-based computing implies that the unit is being used outdoors — and, so far, outdoor use is problematic for wearables, says Perry Nolen, CEO of Xybernaut Corp. in Chantilly, Va. In fact, Xybernaut considers it so problematic that it has pulled out of the wearable field — despite having originally pioneered the wearable field in the early 1990s.

“The technology is simply not there for truly hands-free wearable use,” said Nolen. “We are moving away from the field until such time as the technology does improve, and then we will look at how we want to re-enter it.

“With voice, it is difficult to scroll up and down — anything that involves more than a couple of commands poses problems,” he explained. “As for head-mounted displays, outside the military we have found that when they are used, they are typically in an R&D role rather than a true functional requirement. As for a full display, one with a slim design and an eight-hour battery life is not there.”

Five years ago, the firm began offering a handheld mobile device for its customers, who are mostly involved in outdoor maintenance and inspection. It still has stocks of wearable systems but has seen little demand for them, Nolen said.

“We love the wearable market and wish we could stay in it, but there were not enough proven applications that would let us evolve and grow,” Nolen said.

Back indoors, at another warehouse, Patrick Sweeney, CEO of ODIN Technologies, a maker of RFID system in Dulles, Va., had a slightly different take on wearables. His firm uses wrist-mounted Zypad wearables from Arcom Inc. in Overland Park, Kan., which cost about $2,500 each.

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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