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 […]
9. November 2015

Radio broadcast on ICT in Industry 4.0

Outreach activities are important for research projects, which receive funding from the European Commission. It is therefore essential to inform the public on activities, which support […]
12. October 2015

FACTS4WORKERS presented at COILTECH EXPO in Italy

The International Coil Winding Expo and Conference – Coiltech – was held in Pordenone, Italy from 23th to 24th of September 2015. This exhibition is one of the fastest growing events […]
25. September 2015

The changing world of work presented at ILERA World Congress

The 17th ILERA (International Labour and Employment Relations Associations) World Congress took place from 07.09.2015 to 11.09.2015 in Cape Town under the theme “The Changing World of […]