Smart watch notifications when doing maintenance work

Question

I'm looking to improve the notifications experience for a heavy duty smart watch that assists people working on maintenance activities in a factory environment (e.g. the room they are in might be getting too hot).

There's been some feedback from users that the notifications can be distracting at times, especially when working in groups as all the staff get the notified at the same time. There's also risks of it distracting the work when using equipment with the same hand as the wrist the watch is on.

What should I be considering when improving this experience? The elements that could possibly be used are sound, vibration and the screen itself.

Note: This solution it's not meant to replace any existing safety systems, but to complement them. The solution is compliant with safety standards and has been running on the customer's site for a few months now. This question is asking how to improve the existing experience as we get feedback from its users.

Answer 1

The problem with a smart watch (one of many, but a specific concern here) is that you have to look at it to see what is going on. In addition to heavy gloves covering it, in which case you have to stop what you are doing and use one hand to (carefully) move the glove on the hand, etc. to see the message, there may be tasks where wearing a watch at all is a problem, in which case you put the watch down (vibration useless, sound possibly muffled, watch forgotten when you walk away) or other problems.

The ideal notifications would be:

• Infrequent enough (except of course if there really are a lot of things going wrong) to not be unnecessarily annoying. This means ruling out False Positives (which is always a goal) but also picking carefully what should really be worthy of an alarm.
• Audibly and/or visually really obvious. A smart watch may not have the same audio output as a typical smart phone or tablet, which would make a "beep" enough for you to have to look to find out the rest, where a louder device might be able to have "BEEP BEEP BEEP" followed by "Warning, thermal overload!" (followed 3 minutes later by "Run for your life!"). Similarly, a smart watch's screen could be easily obscured but even when uncovered may be hard to distinguish more than "red alert" vs. "yellow alert" except if you are staring right at it.

If you have to do this via portable electronics (as opposed to systems installed physically in the room - fire alarms, etc. which are well established technology) then I'd think more like a ruggedized smart phone with, depending on personal preference and/or current tasks, mounting it in:

• A belt holster - minimum risk of damage, keeps it totally out of the way, but an extra motion required to view the screen
• An arm band - people use these routinely for running, biking and other exercise. Lets you see the device by moving your arm or your head but keeps it far away from your wrist (important if you are working with your hands on dangerous stuff).
• A neck holder of some sort

And if used in a noisy environment, connect with a Bluetooth one ear headset/earpiece. Not a full headset on both ears - that isn't safe for driving or any dangerous work. But a single ear will let you hear the alert load and clear when you need it without blocking out the rest of the world.

Answer 2

It sounds like you need to validate whether a smart watch is the right device for most of these tasks. People who need to evacuate a facility in potential life-and-death situations probably need something less ignore-able, like flashing lights and blaring alarms in the workspace.

List all of the tasks that your app is doing now, and decide which ones are best integrated with a wearable device. Validate them with research and really hone in on the tasks that are likely to be used. If you're getting your research findings secondhand, see if you can perform a contextual inquiry with your research team and understand things like how often your users are being interrupted (and when they need to be interrupted).

Answer 3

I think you're doing things out of sequence.

A lot of novice developers see a gap in the market and design a product to fill it. Somewhere in between "taking orders at trade shows" and "shipping", they figure they'll tick the "safety certification" box.

And that goes terribly wrong.

You need to come at it from the opposite direction.

• FIRST examine the safety / certification process and book of rules, so compliance with the safety apparatus is built into the product from its first conception on the back of the bar napkin.
• SECOND look for a gap in the market that isn't explained by the safety regulations.

Of course people normally do the safety/compliance thing last, because it's harder. Do it first.

Yes, this will have the effect of killing a lot of stupid ideas.

A common, dime-a-dozen example is "home power monitors". If you look at products like Sense, Curb or Neurio, novices to the field think "why not mount the box outside the panel so it can be powered by a wall-wart, take an Ethernet connection and have an on-board display?" They mortgage their house and develop it, then show up at UL at the 11th hour and UL says "you can't do any of that!" So they sell it underground through shady dealers. There are a disturbing number of those.

Safety equipment needs to be safety rated.

The fatal flaw in your plan is using COTS (commercial, cheap, common off-the-shelf) consumer gear like smart phones and watches, as a substitute for specialized hardware. That seems clever enough to make money on. But it doesn't work, because safety equipment needs to comply with a fairly thick book of safety standards.

They don't use Windows XP for the flight controls on the Airbus 320 or for medical ventilators. And they don't use Android OS for fire alarms.

If the alarm is mandatory, a "watch OS" would not be suitable alone, and a hardwired, safety-rated alarm system would be required. Since it is required, the watch device would be redundant. It might be useful for administrative monitoring where the consequence for a mis-signal is nil... but not for safety-critical monitoring.

Answer 4

I think the answer is two fold:

1. Ask the watch wearers what would be most helpful to them.
2. Examine the root cause of past emergencies, injuries, or other errors, and how any of your features might prevent them or improve their outcomes.

Evaluate each of your notifications and other features in light of these two datasets.

Are you doing something that's hindering the wearers or is causing more issues? Eliminate it.

Is there something the wearers are asking for that would improve their productivity or safety? Implement it.

Is there a root cause of an issue that you could eliminate or warn about via the watch? Implement it.

For example, you mentioned temperature monitoring: If individual workers cause heat output, they may see the heat rise first. An extended rise for too long a time, or to too high a temperature (below the emergency threshold) could be warned about via a soft vibration. Enough to give information that it might be time to ease off, rather than to distract everyone with a loud simultaneous notification.