Middleware-Driven Intelligent Glove for Industrial Applications

Abstract

It is estimated that by the year 2020, 700 million wearable technology devices will be sold worldwide. One of the reasons is the industries' need to increase their productivity. Some of the tools welcomed by industries are handheld devices such as tablets, PDAs and mobile phones. However, handheld devices are not ideal for industrial applications because they often subject users to fatigue during their long working hours. A viable solution to this problem is wearable devices. The advantage of wearable devices is that they become part of the user. Hence, they subject the user to less fatigue, thereby increasing their productivity. This chapter presents the development of an intelligent glove, which is designed to control actuators in an industrial environment. This system utilizes RTI connext data distributed service middleware to facilitate communication over WiFi. Our experiments show very promising results with maximum power consumption of 310 mW and latency as low as 23 ms. These results make the proposed system a perfect fit for most industrial applications.capabilities and energy efficiency. But recent developments in embedded systems have given rise to smaller yet more powerful embedded processors. As such, researchers are now turning their attention toward wearable devices.In wearable sensor network (WeSN), sensor nodes are designed to gather physiological and kinetic data from the wearers' bodies [4]. These devices extend the users' intelligence and their ability to interact with the environment. They also take advantage of the intimacy between the user, the computer and the environment [5]. Wearable sensors can be helpful in industrial applications that require mobile users [6]. They provide more natural avenues of interacting with the system [7,8]. In some scenarios handheld devices are inapplicable or too expensive [9,10]. Furthermore, embedded devices are design specific. Therefore, they are optimized for a given function, unlike their handheld counterparts. This gives them upper hand when it comes to accuracy and reliability [11].Anliker et al. [12] discussed the properties of a good WeSN. The authors stated that a good WeSN should have: (1)The ability to act in a proactive manner rather than depend on user's commands;(2) the ability to gather complex information regarding the user's interaction with the world; (3) high connectivity and mobility; (4) the ability to process wide variety of data at high speeds with low power consumption; (5) the ability to combine I/O devices and sensors from different parts of the body into one heterogeneous system; and (6) inconspicuous appearance such that it does not change the users' look in an unacceptable way or hinder the user from carrying out his/her normal day-to-day activities.Sadly, there has been little research in WeSN with focus on industrial applications. This is due to the fact that distributed embedded systems at an industrial scale are not easy to maintain and control. In this chapter, we present the development of an intelligent hand glove for an i...