Modern electrical, mechanical and plumbing systems are often complex systems which are difficult to install, maintain, and dismantle without significant knowledge of the specific system. A significant amount of effort and time is being invested in creating systems which are easy to install, maintain and dismantle. For example such systems often come with large quantity of installation, operation, and maintenance information often in electronic formats. This information can present a step-by step approach of describing activities in a determined sequence in order to attempt to reduce the amount of errors produced operating the activities. It is understood for example that diagnosing and solving errors made during an installation may lead to significantly higher costs and increases the time needed for completing the building/facility and therefore should be avoided where ever possible.
The availability of the information, type of information and ease of use of this information are all key to reducing errors in these situations. For example installations such as lighting installations may be documented by on-site paper format installation plans. These paper plans are furthermore often on large unwieldy format such as A0 size paper installation plans. Furthermore paper documents such as installation manuals and datasheets of devices are difficult to use and may be easily damaged in some environments. As indicated more recently electronic installation manuals and searchable datasheets of devices have been made available to view from a smart device. These smart devices, such as smartphones and tablets, may also be used to receive and view interactive videos/manuals to assist in the activities or sequences of activities such as installation, operation or maintenance of such systems.
Operating these smart devices typically requires a physical interaction (e.g. touch, swipe etc.). As such while the devices can be useful in preparation and reviewing activities they are less useful or become pointless in scenarios in which the installer needs to use both hands in the activity and thus cannot control the smart device.
Wearable smart-devices or wearable computing devices can help users such as installers to receive information at the right time. Innovative user interfaces associated with the wearable smart-devices, for example smart wearable glasses (Google Glass), or smart wearable watches (SmartWatch), can assist in delivering contextual information to the user by making use of embedded sensors such as cameras, pressure-sensors, light-sensors, ultra sonic sensors, 3D-sensing sensors, gyroscopes, and microphones. These embedded sensors and the user interface enables the wearable smart device to be operated hands-free (e.g. via voice control). These wearable computing devices can also be networked and have access to the internet (either by having stand-alone access or via smartphone/tablet tethering). As such they have access to all the needed information repositories.
This access to information may itself cause problems. A user (for example an installer) may need to regularly switch between types of information on a single device or may need to interact with many different smart devices in order to get the information needed for that particular activity and furthermore control the flow of the information appearing before the user. This may distract the user and allow potential accidents such as electrocution, falling from a height, cuts, burns, or eye injuries to occur.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds