On the road to the realization of the Industry 4.0 vision there are going to coexist technologies that were available ten (and even more) years ago with today’s state of the art (SoA). This is due to the fact that the life time of machines used nowadays on the shop floor exceeds many times, about 15 year of duration, in particular when considering SMEs. In consequence, projects which try to advance in the achievement of the Industry 4.0 vision, like FACTS4WORKERS, should consider it and provide strategies in order to support their coexistence.

Inside the human – Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) interaction field, this means that available Human Machine Interfaces will coexist and collaborate with  SoA (consumer) Human Computer Interaction technologies as a way to deal with workers cognitive demands when interacting with the dynamic (physical and virtual) environments  CPS are already providing.

Within the FACTS4WORKERS we have created a Taxonomy of HCI Technologies to be used on Shop Floor to implement Industry 4.0. This taxonomy is a result of the analysis of existing HCI technologies and it also evaluates their maturity level following a TRL like scale both in the consumer and (manufacturing) industrial sector. The analysis has been performed without focusing on FACTS4WORKERS use cases requirements in a first priority, in order to try to be as general as possible. Interested readers can obtain the complete analysis accessing the deliverable D2.1 “Technology Monitoring: Report on Information Needed For Workers in the Smart Factory”. This document contains details of the process followed to create the taxonomy, about the reported technologies and the relations between what we call HCI Enabling Technologies and HCI systems.

Because of the highly dynamic creation of new devices and enabling technologies, both the deliverable and the taxonomy are going to be updated on a yearly basis. By proceeding in this way we aim to get two objectives. Firstly, our desire is to be able to consider new technologies implementations to solve the problems detected during the FACTS4WORKERS use case deployments. Secondly, and probably more important, our desire is to be considered a reference for other people involved in the implementation of the Industry 4.0 vision.

1. December 2015

Taxonomy of HCI technologies

On the road to the realization of the Industry 4.0 vision there are going to coexist technologies that were available ten (and even more) years ago […]
1. December 2015

Smart Glasses Comparison

Smart glasses raised a lot of attention since Google announced the Google Glass back in 2012. In the meantime a variety of different smart glasses have […]