State-of-the-Art of Industrial Wearables: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Wearable devices have been broadly studied and explored in the last ten years in many various directions such as sports, education, healthcare, transportation, military, and many others. Currently, one of the sectors widely using such devices is industries and factories interested in improving the level of labor safety as part of the broader Industry 4.0 paradigm. This paper aims to overview the current state of the wearable devices market related to this niche and highlight modern industrial wearables, new techniques, and approaches in this research field. The purpose of this article is not to criticize but to provide information for developers in this scientific field and identifying possible areas where improvements are required.

Wearables for Biomechanical Performance Optimization and Risk Assessment in Industrial and Sports Applications

“…Wearable devices are much more common in biomechanical use cases for the sports athlete and fitness applications than for industrial athlete applications [ 11 ], primarily due to technological, economic, and worker privacy concerns [ 12 , 13 ]. However, significant efforts are underway to improve wearable device functionality and industrial applications for monitoring both worker safety and performance [ 14 ].…”

Wearables for Industrial Work Safety: A Survey

“…In the framework of technological issues, several previous works pointed out the problems of finding the trade-off between functionality, battery life of a wearable device, its size and convenience for the user, adjusting one device to several users in big industries, management, and processing of the considerable amount of data produced by the heterogeneous devices [ 18 , 92 ]. In addition to it, it is also worth noting the problem of ensuring high accuracy of positioning, especially in indoor scatter-rich environments.…”

“…Extra low or extra high atmospheric pressure cause respiratory, heart, neurological changes, barotraumas, decompression illness, etc. [94,95] BMPxxx sensor group [92], barometers embedded in bands, smartwatches, glasses [96], etc.…”

“…Privacy and security T, S, D [180,181] Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and other lightweight cryptography [182] Development of strong authentication schemes Location data privacy S, D [183,184] Adding noise to the exact coordinates on the device side before transmitting it to the cloud [185,186] Transmission of the location-related function instead of the coordinates Social resistance S [18,92] Development of the simple and detailed manual, video guidance and provision of the constant support to eliminate the problem of low technical skills of users; [187,188] Usage of Technology Acceptance Models (TAM) to estimate key factors affecting the level of social resistance and rearrange the process implementation of the technology accordingly [189] Involving of the employees in the process of the choice of wearables [190] Data flows transparency Heterogeneity of the IIoT devices D, SD [191] Application of the data fusion approaches on the hardware level, seamless integration on the protocol level Placement of preprocessing and processing entities D [192,193] Optimization of data placement, dynamic computation resource allocation, computation offloading techniques. In [18], the authors highlight the main challenge groups compliant with the adoption of wearable devices: technological, social, economic, data-related, and standards-related.…”

Receiver coil built into belt for heat dissipation of watch-type smart devices

“…Among these, the global smartwatch market is expected to grow at the CAGR of 18.32% from 2020 to 2026 [1]. Smartwatches are used for wellness, medical, personal assistance, sports, human activity recognition, and other applications [2,3,4,5,6]. To achieve their purposes, many technologies such as wireless communications and monitoring are being incorporated.…”