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What one piece of technology would most improve your working life?
Chances are it wouldn't be a glove. But car workers in Germany are now using smart gloves that not only save time but prevent accidents as well.
It is an example of how tech-enhanced humans are fighting back against the seemingly unstoppable rise of the robots.
At BMW's spare parts plant in Dingolfing, for example, which employs around 17,500 people, hand-held barcode readers have been replaced by gloves that scan objects when you put your thumb and forefinger together. The data is sent wirelessly to a central computer.
The hi-tech gloves allow workers to keep hold of items with both hands while scanning more quickly. While this may only save a few seconds each time, BMW reckons it adds up to 4,000 work minutes, or 66 hours, a day.
It's not just gloves; the article gives several examples of cool technology that help workers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21 2016, @11:20PM
One of the better Iron Man suits with the Jarvis AI. The later models got crappier (some of the earlier models could survive shots by tanks and not get quickly destroyed by Thor but other models had problems getting hit by a truck or merely Captain America)
Yeah ever since he started making them by the dozens in Iron Man 3 the quality went down.
Probably also a side-effect of those later suits being able to open up on their own to let him in and out rather than the whole apparatus that literally assembled it onto him. If I recall this was actually addressed in the comics a few times as a trade-off during the evolution of the suits.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday December 22 2016, @12:52PM
It's not so much that the quality has suffered, but that there is only a finite amount awesome [tvtropes.org] to be shared between them.