Interactive Workwear: Smart Maintenance Jacket

The Industry 4.0: Smart Maintenance Jacket was developed as a collaborative project between Design Research Lab at Berlin University of the Arts and Telekom Innovation Laboratories. The aim was to explore benefits that Wearable Technology can bring to maintenance work in industrial settings, and provide an outlook of how networked Wearables employed in these environments can play an important role for telecommunication providers in the near future.A circuit with sensors, actuators and microcontroller was implemented using electronic textiles. Embedded notification outputs are selectable from three modes (visual, audio, haptic) to aid with navigation, guidance through danger zones and triggering a warning alarm for approaching objects outside the range of view of the wearer.While it was important to design and build a functional prototype to demonstrate the potential, another focus was set on garment construction using fashion design principles, to improve usability and user acceptance of interactive workwear in the context of Industry 4.0.