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 increas- ing 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.