Micromanagement Material: Electronic Sleeves Monitor Workers’ Efficiency
Technology Saturday, January 7th, 2012
By Dave Mosher, Wired.com
Computerized sleeves may soon allow manufacturing bosses to monitor and record workers’ moves and mine them for efficiency data.
The sleeves are just prototypes for now, but the devices are intended to replace stopwatch-wielding time lords hovering around employees to assess their efficiency.
Motion-capture systems (such as those used to animate computer-generated movie characters) might allow Big Brother monitoring on par with the sleeves, but such systems require special computing, expensive video cameras and other impractical elements. So a pair of wearable, breathable electronic sleeves may become the ultimate micromanaging tool.
“The present stopwatch method only allows a process organizer to time five individuals simultaneously, depending on the situation,” said research manager Martin Woitag of the Fraunhofer Institute in a press release. “Our solution makes it possible to record time simultaneously, even at several workplaces, without requiring additional labor.”
Each sleeve has a matchbox-sized sensor in the hand, forearm and upper arm. As an industrial worker goes through the motions of assembling something like a circuit board, the sensors record body-part acceleration, angular velocities and positions, and send them to a computer. Special software then combines the data to assess common movements such as reaching forward and backward, grasping objects and releasing them.
To read more, visit: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/01/electronic-sleeve-monitoring/
Short URL: https://reteaparty.com/?p=5418
Now if only they could come up with some kind of electronic brain sleeve that corporate executives and managers could wear that would enable shareholders to monitor whether they are making good decisions or not…