JourneyApps recently partnered with RealWear® to allow rapid delivery of custom voice-driven apps that increase the ROI of RealWear® investment. Here’s why we believe the match makes sense:
Wearables are relevant, and RealWear® has the best product available.
Ever since Google’s Project Glass imagined how head-mounted wearables would get technology “out of the way” in 2012, we’ve been guardedly waiting for that world to emerge (along with our flying cars). In the time since, we’ve learnt that the strongest demand for hands-free technology won’t come from the consumer market, but from enterprises interested in increasing the effectiveness and safety of their employees.
RealWear was potentially the first to realize this, creating the fully rugged HMT-1 head-mounted tablet device, optimized for the loud, sometimes messy environments their users work in. The unobtrusive design pioneers the new assisted reality category that, unlike augmented reality, gives users an easy-to-read visual display without blocking their range of vision – keeping users safe.
- RealWear’s HMT-1 device connected to a hard hat.
RealWear’s understanding of this market need has been borne out in their position as market leader for industrial hands-free wearable computing and their 3X year-on-year growth in 2020.
Much like how radar technology had to be refined over many years before it could be combined with other technologies and conceptualized as the household essential known as the microwave oven, RealWear’s head-mounted tablet represents the thoughtful combination of many technological innovations into an extremely useful product for today’s industrial workforce.
Their product is a new platform for industrial digitization and automation that gives companies new options to pursue safer, more efficient operations.
Custom workflow apps are the sensible next step for increasing the impact of RealWear® investment.
When the iPad was released, it was initially adopted by businesses for its out-of-the-box usefulness for tasks like email, calendar management, and viewing documents. Over time, as more software was developed for iPads, their full potential was realized, and today iPads are used to run entire stores, check in rental cars, and manage field service jobs.
Similarly, RealWear devices deliver value out-of-the-box; perhaps most significantly through the remote expert use case, where field personnel are supported by experts located anywhere in the world. However, for many businesses, this represents only the very tip of value that the HMT can unlock. To unlock more value, creating voice-driven workflow apps tailored to specific user tasks will be key – and that’s where JourneyApps comes in.
The top use cases existing JourneyApps customers want to address include:
- Extending ERP workflows to wearable devices.
- Hands-free inspection processes.
- Guided work instructions.
- Contextual awareness for operator rounds.
- Executing maintenance jobs with connections to equipment.
We’ve seen strong potential for voice-driven workflow apps to increase efficiencies: one of our Fortune 200 customers reported a 50% time saving when field engineers used a voice-driven app to complete a custom site inspection process compared to using a keyboard.
A strong overlap in focus leads to symbiotic technology.
Both JourneyApps and RealWear are focussed on enabling the industrial workforce with technology that makes work more safe and more efficient. JourneyApps brings unique technologies to the table that build upon the RealWear HMT’s suitability for the real-world conditions of industrial workers.
Apps work when users are offline
Through our PowerSync technology, any app built on JourneyApps is automatically set up to work even if end users have no connectivity. This can be a critical need for end users who may move in and out of WiFi dark spots within a facility, or travel to locations where connectivity is not guaranteed.
Seamless handoff between RealWear® HMT and other devices
Apps built on JourneyApps work on RealWear as well as on iOS, Windows, Android and MacOS devices, with data automatically syncing between devices. This allows for seamless handoff between RealWear and other platforms, allowing users to, for example, start a process on a laptop, conduct a portion of that process through a RealWear device and send it over to another user to review on their mobile phone.
Connecting to industrial equipment and historians
Our Hardware Engine allows apps to connect to industrial technologies such as BLE equipment interfaces, MQTT brokers and historians, opening the way for RealWear users to view equipment performance metrics directly on their RealWear device, as they, for example, conduct their operator rounds or complete a maintenance job.
Conclusion
Put simply, our partnership with RealWear is based on the realization that RealWear customers could benefit from JourneyApps, and JourneyApps customers could benefit from RealWear. We believe the natural fit of our two technologies will lead to value creation that is greater than the sum of its parts.
There’s a lot more to say about this new avenue for industrial digitization and automation – and we plan to! If you’re interested in coming along for the journey, subscribe for blog post notifications here and read more about our RealWear capabilities on our website here. Also, you can see our RealWear FAQs.
