Employing technology to improve asset management will boost your business decades ahead. Cutting costs, providing excellent digital working tools, enhancing safety, and much more will all be fueled by emerging technologies. Dynaway is continuously researching new possibilities to empower our business partners with the latest and greatest in technology to help manage your assets.
Today, we look at how Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) can benefit from smartwatches. Smartwatches are seeing a considerable rise in popularity. Applications provide users with easier micro-interactions and new, great experiences. This includes monitoring your heart rate while on the run, playing music through wireless headphones, indicating directions through haptic vibrations and much more.
Smartwatch market
A wide variety of smartwatches exist today. Apple has its Apple Watches, WearOS (Google) runs on watch manufacturers like Huawei, Fossil, Misfit, and more.
Designing for the smartwatches is powered by strong design guidelines from both Apple and Google. These guidelines ensure, if correctly followed, a great user experience. Every watch comes with its own set of controls for manipulation of the application on it. These could include differences in the number of buttons and their functionality. For example, how many buttons watch has, can buttons rotate (for zooming?), and how software is mapped on the smartwatch.
If you are looking into investing in smartwatches, it is a good idea to research what developers of a specific application have done to accommodate different smartwatch models.
Development for the Apple Watch line of products is done through either of the programming languages Objective C or Swift. For WearOS watches, development is done in the Java programming language.
The smartwatch market is dominated by Apple, with its range of Apple watches. Holding a smaller market share, we find Samsung and Fitbit along with a variety of smaller players. We are seeing broad adoption of smartwatches from consumers. It seems Google has become aware of this. They are both strengthening the focus on their smartwatch operating system WearOS as well as acquiring Fitbit for $2,1 billion.
What part will smartwatches play in EAM?
Will it be a tool for employees to update the maintenance work orders they are assigned to? Or will it be the maintenance manager's best friend to keep updated on day to day progress? We see many ways that smartwatch applications can create value for our business partners. Will the smartwatch provide a maintenance planner the required knowledge needed to act on critical work orders quickly? Or will it give workers time-saving micro-interactions, allowing them to update the state of a work order quickly? Leveraging smartwatches to optimize productivity throughout your business is not far away!
We have included a small sample of some of the visions we have for a smartwatch application. These include very early paper sketches and more visual UI examples.
Dynaway is always looking to empower you with access to the technology that will make your asset management excel!
Are you interested in more? We've collected a series of links that present more information.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/watchkit
https://wearos.google.com/#hands-free-help
https://www.wareable.com/smartwatches
https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/watchos/overview/themes/
