Ctg sit23 hub banner.jpg

Wearable tech: How the construction sector is saving time, money and the planet

Image:

Wearable tech: How the construction sector is saving time, money and the planet

Mace Group turned to remote inspection at the start of the pandemic, and hasn’t looked back since

Wearable technology has not been the revolution originally envisioned. While Google Glass had a compelling concept, the reality was often slow and clunky - and it just screamed ‘tech bro' to wear out in public.

But while head-mounted displays (HMDs) are still in their infancy for consumer use, commercial customers have taken to them in a big way. Industries that require workers to keep their hands free, like oil & gas and mechanical/electrical/plumping (MEP), are reaping the benefits of being able to share screens and view instructions without needing to look away from the immediate task.

The construction sector is another that's making forays into wearable displays - for safety, as well as cost- and time-savings.

"It's not very safe to walk around a busy construction site when you're holding a tablet, or round a factory environment where you've got machines cutting and drilling," says Phil Sedge, façade operations director at Mace Group: a massive consultancy and construction firm with operations around the world.

When COVID-19 struck last year, it placed strict restrictions on travel, but Mace Group still needed people at sites to sign off work. The company began to investigate remote inspection technology, allowing just one person to visit a site and multiple people to view the video feed from an HMD on a video call.

After investigating the market, Sedge settled on a RealWear device called the HMT-1. He says, "I was given three months with my working group to come up with a strategy document, which turned into four weeks in the end, because once we found the RealWear product, we knew we'd hit on something really good, so we wanted to embrace that straightaway."

Going global from home

Mace has 20 HMT units now, and is sending them out worldwide. For example, an employee in Germany takes a unit on site visits to different glass and glazing factories (where much of the glasswork for London in manufactured) and shares his view with architects, clients, consultants, managers and more.

"Instead of them travelling to monitor the production all the way through the process, they're actually just on the call and they tell him what they want to look at, and he goes through periodically around the factory and does that."

The rollout is not limited to Europe; Sedge tells us about another project in South America:

"We've got five in Peru being used in mechanical/electrical, so...in mechanical/electrical where you do a lot of prefabrication offsite, you have to witness some of the circuitry as you're installing it and how it's connected. Now we're using RealWear to do that. Before, it was a guy, or three people, going to a factory and witnessing the connections as they were doing them up, and testing them... Now we can do all of that through RealWear.

"Health and safety teams are looking at using it, too. Instead of six or seven people turning up on a health and safety tour to ensure that a big project is up to the right quality standards, we're now putting one of the construction managers on site with a RealWear product, walking around the site, talking back to the quality management team."

The savings from operating this way are "phenomenal," and Sedge expects the use of wearables to continue to evolve:

"We think, on a typical project, we're saving probably 2,000 tonnes of carbon, 100 man-days of travel, and probably about £100,000 in cost. So, there's actually a reduction in cost, reduction in time and reduction in travel, which is also a reduction in carbon. It's just a win-win for us.

"There's always an element of touch and feel that people want. Architects would like to go and look at a piece of glass, touch it and go and do that, so we think 25 per cent of our normal activities will still happen [in-person], but 75 per cent - we think - we can save, and we're gradually working on that. That will start to evolve as more and more people get used to the product and accept what the technology can do."

It's about user awareness

As with any new technology, there were challenges in the rollout. For example, WiFi dropouts are common in factories and on construction sites where coverage is patchy. That can also affect image clarity, which is an issue when the device's USP is to share what you see.

Sedge points out that RealWear has an attachment to address this by connecting directly to a mobile internet service ("It's like a big aerial"), but there's a limit to what the hardware can capture when the wearer is moving at speed. RealWear said an update released this year added an image stabilisation function to mitigate the problem.

Sedge also describes the HMD wearer having to act as a relay for conversations between the people on the call and those on-site, which is a challenge in large calls. However, he's quick to point out that training could solve this:

"I don't see that as a problem myself; if the other guys [on-site] just had their phone and signed into Teams, they could communicate straight with them anyway. It's about user awareness of what the product can actually do."

Which brings us to the key blocker for any new tech: training. We're very used to pick-up-and-play consumer devices today, but enterprise models tend to be a bit more complex.

Except, Sedge says, that's not the case with the RealWear HMD. As is traditional in IT circles, he puts the onus on the users - not without reason, as it turns out.

"A 55-year-old engineer that I talked to used the product about six weeks ago. I took him into a meeting room with [RealWear's UK agent] SystemActive, we went through the product, we went through how to use it... We went through all of that with him. He went on holiday for a week, came back, forgot everything, tried to have a call with the client, and then blamed the product. I was saying, ‘But I went through all of this with you!'

"Actually, its use is very, very easy, it's more the user's fault for it not working very well or for not going through the training; but for training, it is really a 10-minute rough-and-ready to go through the product to be able to use it. I could show my mum and dad how to use it very quickly. I could teach my kids how to use it. It's a very, very easy product to use."

Wearable displays still have a long way to go to reach mainstream acceptance among consumers, but they're evolving quickly in business. Companies roll out new features and updates regularly, making them more usable and increasing the likelihood of bringing in new customers, whose own feedback will continue to improve those products.

It's a bit unusual to see a consumer product transition to enterprise - the reverse is often true - but perhaps this is just a necessary step in the evolution of wearable displays.

Wearable tech: How the construction sector is saving time, money and the planet

Mace Group turned to remote inspection at the start of the pandemic, and hasn’t looked back since

Going global from home

Components

Tata's UK gigafactory project takes major step forward

Public Sector

National Grid is turning analogue to digital - Ctrl Alt Lead podcast

Green

AI to blame for Google's rocketing greenhouse gas emissions