SCDigest Editorial Staff
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 Manufacturers and distributors of automatic identification equipment report growing interest in wearable devices for distribution applications.
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Wearable mobile data collection devices have been around for many years, but are enjoying a new lease on life after a first wave of equipment in the 1990s that many felt weren’t quite up to the rigors of distribution center life.
“The original wearable computers often didn’t get the ergonomics quite right,” said LXE’s Mark Dessommes on a recent videocast from Supply Chain Digest “The weight and how it was distributed often weren’t ideal.”
That videocast, Leveraging Existing Wireless and AIDC Networks to Reduce Costs and Increase Productivity, is now available on-demand and provides a number of smart ideas: Wireless and AIDC Networks Videocast.)
“Wearable” mobile wireless terminals are generally worn on the lower forearm, connected to a “ring” type bar code scanner worn on a finger.
As a result, wearables allow operators to work, in effect, “hands free,” just as they can with voice-enabled terminals. In fact, wearables can themselves be voice-enabled, allowing operators to work hands free even in they have to sometimes scan bar codes as part of a distribution center process.
When first released in the mid-1990s, tens of thousands of wearables were sold, but a few very large buyers, such as UPS, represented a high percentage of total sales. Many customers did not like the ergonomics, and there were concerns about durability. For a number of years, very little progress was made in terms of new product development.
That started to change a few years ago, as new generations of equipment first came to market. The new devices were lighter, brighter, and much easier for operators to use. As just one of many examples, now the ring scanners can be linked wirelessly to the terminal via a “bluetooth” connection, whereas in the past, they had a tethered cable connection that could bother operators and be easily damaged.
totes Isotoner in Cincinnati provides a good example of the impact of these improvements. When totes first automated its new distribution center in 1998, the iconic manufacturer of umbrellas, slippers, gloves and other products took a look at wearable computers for pallet builders at the end of sortation system divert lines, but worries about durability and other issues led the company to go with fixed scanners. But that meant operators had to look at a computer monitor after manually moving a carton passed the fixed scanner to see what pallet a carton needed to be placed on. That took extra seconds that added up over tens of thousands of cartons per day.
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What to Consider in Evaluating Wearables
