Ubiquitous Machinery Monitoring – A Field Study on Manufacturing Workers’ User Experience of Mobile and Wearable Monitoring Apps

Abstract

Fueled by ongoing digitization efforts, manufacturing is currently undergoing a transformational process towards interconnected machinery and workforce, which enables a wide range of interactive monitoring and controlling applications. Whereas existing user-centered work addressed remote monitoring from office workplaces, it remains unclear how manufacturing workers experience and adopt machinery monitoring apps on mobile and wearable devices. To close this gap, we conducted a four-week field study in a running factory to study workers’ overall user experience and acceptance of such monitoring apps, the subjective impact on their work routines, and their preferred device type. Under productive operation, 11 manufacturing workers used functional application prototypes on smartphones and smartwatches to receive notifications of machine incidents. In 22 individual interviews and two focus groups, we collected the participants’ impressions and assessments. Based on these results, we derive a set of recommendations for designing and deploying machinery monitoring apps for manufacturing workers.