The New Connect

Daniel Bardsley reports from Bosch’s Connected World 2018 conference in Berlin, where the firm announced a range of eye-catching innovations around driverless cars, pollution prevention and smart gloves.

On the factory floor of old, a supervisor may have stood sentinel over a group of operatives to ensure they did their work properly. Today, electronics can be used to monitor the performance of staff members, as well as to train them.

German electronics and engineering company Bosch is launching its Intelligent Glove (iGlove), which can be used to measure the hand movements of operatives in connected manufacturing.

Using technology similar to that found in cameras and mobile phones to detect which way up a device is, the gloves use Bluetooth to transmit information on movement to a computer or a smartphone. If the system detects that a particular operation has been performed correctly, a screen shows a green icon; if not, a red image is displayed.

“You can teach the system a standardised move, and the system can decide if the standardised move has been followed,” said Cord von Hoersten, vice president, automotive electronics, Bosch Automotive Products. “If you give the operators these gloves, the information is much more detailed and you don’t spend hours with a stopwatch [observing staff]. It’s much more accurate.” The iGlove helps organisations test how accurately a staff member is carrying out a particular process, allowing for much faster training. The iGlove may also be useful for measuring how performance at a task drops off with time, indicating when staff should swap roles.

Meanwhile, a driver will have to do little more than press a button for a car to travel between two major cities almost entirely autonomously once Bosch’s new system launches in 2020.