How is wearable technology impacting industrial applications?

Market research experts expect a growing adoption of wearable sensors in industrial facilities. Gloves with fabric-based sensors are one of the growing applications. While they were initially designed to improve the gaming experience and sports activities, lightweight gloves with highly sensitive and accurate sensors can increase productivity and safety in an industrial environment. For example, BeBop Sensors’ Forte Gloves are wireless, work for 15 hours on a single charge via USB and can communicate via Bluetooth. Industrial and automotive customers that were using other BeBop Sensors’ products have already created applications for the Forte Gloves.

“In an industrial setting, a worker wearing such gloves can bring a lot of data back to the workplace designer,” says Sri Peruvemba, VP of Strategy, BeBop Sensors. “You can prevent injuries. You can design work such that pressure applied to someone’s hands is within what is acceptable by medical standards. There are a whole host of applications associated with this.”

The gloves are currently being used by both industrial and automotive customers to study tasks to be able to quality-check certain activities and adjust them as required so that they improve worker safety and productivity. These sensing-based processes also help deliver better quality products.

For gaming, BeBop Sensors has also incorporated haptic actuators into the gloves so not only can the users see precisely where their hand is, including each of their fingers, the glove senses bend, twist, force and stretch, so users can now get haptic feedback as well. It will be interesting to see how this aspect is used in industrial applications.