Science Fiction Becomes a Reality: Wearables for MRO

In-field A&D maintenance, compared to maintenance back at base or at the depot, is very different – usually complicated by factors such as distance from the home base, environmental conditions, operating pressures, and even cultural constraints. Maintenance engineers need to have the right equipment and technology to allow them to do their job as efficiently and quickly as possible. Wearable and context-aware technology is proving to be a highly capable solution in aircraft and military maintenance.

Maintenance activity requires, as a basic minimum, the right information and technical support with the right functionality to support operations, so it is a no-brainer that this needs to be tailored for the environment where the maintenance is taking place. For many years vendors have deployed solutions that are complex, full enterprise solutions on mobile devices. But in-field maintenance bears little or no similarity to that back at base; instead, the environment is unique and often extreme. Time pressure is often increased for field engineers who have to meet tight turnaround schedules, and have the right technical documentation and direction on hand, dependent on the task and time. Tailored functionality for the specific environment is critical to meeting operational deadlines.

Understand the Situation

Speedy resolution of unusual problems can be enhanced if equipment and those in support can understand the multiple contexts the field engineer is encountering. These include 'user' context such as the user’s profile, location, people nearby, and even the current social situation; 'physical' context such as lighting, noise levels, traffic conditions, and temperature; 'time' context such as time of day, week, month, and season of the year at the deployed location; and operational context to monitor spare part availability and the maintenance task at hand.

This is where wearables and context-aware technology enter the fray. According to recent Forrester research, 68 percent of global technology and business decision makers say that wearables are a priority for their ﬁrm, with 51 percent calling it a moderate, high, or critical priority.

The relationship between wearables and context-aware applications is symbiotic. Wearables can sense the user's physical environment much more completely than previously possible, and in many more situations. This makes them excellent platforms for applications where the computer is working even when you aren't giving explicit commands. Future developments will introduce increased use of solutions that will automatically tailor their presentation and operation through recognition of the maintenance environment.

Industry Applications

In the base environment, there are opportunities for application of the technology across production, quality assurance, safety, warehousing, and logistics. For example, wearables can increase worker agility. Supporting the location of faulty wires or equipment on a grounded aircraft, and notifying workers about hazards such as the presence of other activities being conducted on the aircraft, are areas that could be addressed right now. Boeing is currently experimenting with augmented reality for aircraft maintenance with a hands-free device instructing workers where to ﬁnd a product in the inventory.

This could be extended to giving mechanics virtual 'sight' of components hidden behind other systems or structures relative to their personal location - allowing them to remove, fit, or adjust a component that they cannot physically see.

Improving MRO Efficiency and Safety

Wearables with augmented reality have the potential to automatically identify the spare part required by a field engineer. Information on the appearance, known context, and maintenance task required can then be fed through to the engineer's wearable device negating the need to barcode scan or consult technology documents in difficult maintenance environments - such as a dark submarine bilge or the underbelly of an aircraft - where movement is limited. It also removes the requirement for the intimate support of a base supply chain and logistician. This comes with the added bonus of not having to hike miles across an airfield to access catalogs in a maintenance hangar or planning office.

With context-aware and wearable technology, the engineer can ensure that the right item is selected, with the benefit of reducing time-consuming document and database searches that introduce a greater opportunity for error. Increased autonomy thanks to wearables and context-aware computing means the maintenance engineer spends less time stopping work to consult collateral material, improving overall MRO efficiency.

Wearables can also be used for maintenance, repairs and over-the-shoulder coaching for remote engineers. Cargo and maintenance personnel from a major airline have tested the use of an optical head-mounted display (OHMD) to help inspect aircraft on the tarmac. They capture video and photos and send them to a central oﬃce where technical safety professionals assess an aircraft’s condition.

IFS is working with XM Reality to bring forward a remote expert to assist in complex maintenance to broaden the capabilities of maintenance engineers on the ground - 'augmenting' flight-line workers' skills. IFS believes adding cognitive applications and voice-controlled intelligent agents similar to Siri to wearable devices would further augment such workers' skills, helping them identify and act on speciﬁc problems with more autonomy.

The Future With Consumer-Based Technology

With device development enabling us to monitor activity in more detail, user context awareness will be included in consumer devices to an ever-increasing degree. Imagine what could be achieved if technologies like cameras and the Kinect (a motion-sensing input device by Microsoft for the Xbox One video game console) were included in appliances and devices in your base maintenance facility or field location. Recognizing where people are and what they do will enable designers to create attentive applications that look at what is going on and react appropriately. For example, teleporting - sometimes called “follow-me” computing - is a tool available today to dynamically map the user interface onto the resources of the surrounding computer and communication facilities in office complexes.

In a maintenance environment, this could be adapted so that relevant applications can 'follow' a worker moving around maintenance locations or even different equipment and process bays in an aircraft, and be available as required. The maintenance station will recognize which member of your maintenance team is going to use it based on identity tag or even body profile, and preselect that person’s authorized maintenance or repair task schedules. If directly linked to equipment health monitors, it could automatically add high priority preventive maintenance tasks to a repair schedule being undertaken in the same location.

CCS Insight predicts that there will be up to 100 million smartphone companions such as smartwatches by 2017. Research from Business Insider Intelligence indicates the global wearables market will grow at an annual compound rate of 35 percent over the next five years.

Future wearable technology must be demonstrably useful - both needed and wanted. To be wanted, we have got to have valuable applications that will benefit wearables and be contextually aware - only then can we truly demonstrate a real return on investment that warrants change and adoption of the technology.

The Way Forward: User-Friendly Platforms

The key to this is not so much wearables, but the context-aware applications that are accessed by or loaded onto them. Making applications more social and user friendly through context-aware wearable technology will surely be the way forward. Mobile apps offer a solution to the problem of gaining essential feedback of operational information without inundating the engineer. They must be task-specific, in a recognizable format, optimized for specific equipment, easy to customize, and devoid of superfluous overhead.

The ability to add operational data relating to flight, crew, and vehicle in real time adds real value to enterprise resource planning (ERP). The next step would be to install mobile apps on to a wearable device that automatically records when and where a fault is logged – saving valuable time by negating the need for the engineer to stop working in order to log on to a laptop or handheld device to gain access to back-office information.

Operators could have direct support at their fingertips, in their ears, or in front of their eyes, and also intimately understand the challenges they are facing. The development of hardware and sensors to 'socialize' the technology is about to take off, but these are really just delivery and input points for information that allows context-tailored applications to link users to powerful enterprise processes.

The immediate benefits of delivering powerful computer support directly to users and capturing contextual information to improve enterprise-level knowledge offer opportunities to streamline MRO activity and allow supply chains to get ahead of the game. Integrating innovative wearable and context-aware technology with an agile aircraft maintenance ERP application streamlines support and reduces costly operational downtime. The result is aircraft spend more time in the air with maintenance support tailored to suit any environment, at any time.

Kevin Deal is vice president for Aerospace & Defence, IFS North America, headquartered in Itasca, IL. For more information visit http://www.ifsworld.com or call (888) 437-4968.