Here’s a product category of which I was unaware and which I find pretty interesting—industrial wearables. From New Equipment Digest:
The age of the connected industrial worker has been a long time coming. It began in the 1990s, the availability of affordable mobile technology that wirelessly linked people across the plant around the world. Gradually, over the last two decades, the Industrial Internet of Things has allowed greater numbers of machines to communicate with each other almost instantaneously. The logical next step for manufacturers is to merge humans and machines.
The article goes on to describe a number of new products in the category, mostly headsets. Safety strikes me as being a major concern.
Could also lead to deskilling some jobs and making others (say QC inspectors) redundant. Also imagine the time-motion/phb folks will be over joyed with yet another way to ride workers.
On the plus side, it would make inspections and maintenance a lot easier. the ability to pull a shop manual is another plus.