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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BMW's spare parts plant in Dingolfing, for example, which employs around 17,500 people, hand-held barcode readers have been replaced by gloves that scan objects when you put your thumb and forefinger together.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: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday December 22 2016, @09:21AM
Wow. So, you have your shopping list in electronic form and you think that the most efficient use of this is to transfer it to a portable device, physically move yourself to a shop, walk around the shop, put things into a trolley, and take the things home? Sounds like bad 1980s science fiction.
If I have my shopping list in electronic form, I paste it into a text field on my preferred supermarket's web site. It then populates a virtual trolley for me, given me searches for things that don't have exact matches. My weekly shop takes me a total of around 10 minutes and it's delivered to my door at a time convenient for me (within a one-hour window). It comes in a refrigerated van, so frozen stuff is not partially defrosted by the time I get it home, even in the middle of summer. The van has a route that delivers to a load of people, so it's far more energy efficient than all of us going to the shop and back. If I order a few days in advance, it's integrated with their inventory management system, so they are never out of stock of anything that I want (they sometimes are if I order the day before delivery).
sudo mod me up