A major area of interest in wearable technology is its ability to free the wearer’s hands, allowing the worker to perform tasks without any hindrance. Wearable devices can augment natural human capabilities, such as better vision or smell (gas detection), thereby increasing the productivity and safety of oilfield operations.
In an industrial context, wearable devices provide the wearer with a safe and secure workplace while minimizing the effect of unforeseen events. Field workers are generally more prone to health problems and accidents when working in industrial environments that include remote locations, property that is not easily accessible, extreme temperature and pressure changes, and the presence of heavy machinery. In such working conditions, wearable devices can capture important field workforce statistics and health monitoring and transmit them to control centers in real time.
Research and development of a customized application for supporting wearable technology efficiently at onshore sites for the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company have helped
- Increased the response time and accuracy for frontline jobs
- Enabled instant access to documents and materials while at work
- Provided a new way of performing frontline jobs, more efficiently and safely
Limitations of the technology includes
- The application is written for Android devices and cannot be installed in devices that do not support the Android operating system.
- The application is developed and optimized to run on private General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) network and cannot be extended to any other network scenarios.
- Although the application is optimized to run on a low-bandwidth network, its seamless functionality requires a decent network connectivity.