The impact of industrial wearable system on industry 4.0

Although industrial automation and robots develop rapidly in the era of “Industry 4.0”, the increasing integration of manufacturing processes and the strengthening of the autonomous capabilities of manufacturing systems make investigating the role of humans a primary research objective. This study is among the first to examine the impact of industrial wearable system in industry 4.0. Industrial Wearable System (IWS) is defined as human empowering technology that fit the operators' cognitive and physical needs, while improving human physical-, sensing- and cognitive-capabilities using new generation of industrial infromatics. Three research objectives are as examined, including (1) to illustrate the specific manufacturing and logistics application scenarios enabled by IWS; (2) to construct human-centric IWS technical framework for industry 4.0; and (3) to verify the presented framework and technology via a real-life case study.