In this paper, we presented a mobile information system introducing smartwatches for the support of employees in collaborative workflows within the industrial sector. Inspired by the design science research method of Peffers et al. (2007), we illustrated a strictly problem-orientated research design.
We first identified and described the problem found in practice through a workshop series (RQ1). We formulated objectives and inferred requirements based on qualitative interviews with practitioners.
( )
The functional meta requirements 4 - 9 can be confirmed.
Applicability to related scenarios is expected.
smartwatchdesktop Legend
: evaluated in interviews : evaluation deduced from FRs ( )
52 Studies: Smartwatch-based IS Supporting Mobile Employees Executing Manual Work
During the design phase, we developed functional meta requirements to address a broad range of similar problems. We presented the software meta-artifact smartActivity composed of a smartwatch application, a desktop backend, and a server infrastructure (RQ2). With this, it is possible to cover the original problem of supporting a workflow within a service system, including machine operators and a quality assurance division, where an exchange of information is slow, media distortions occur, and employees have a lot of unnecessary footpaths. In a demonstration step, we presented our system to practitioners and explained the applicability with a suited configuration and workflow. Subsequently, we gathered feedback during a workshop and qualitative interviews for an evaluation (RQ3). According to the experts, the unique features of smartActivity result in an improvement of the process and product quality as well as in a reduction of the employees’ workload. Particularly, the rigorous collaborative workflow guidance based on uninterruptive, immediate, and location-independent information exchange was highlighted as a key feature and major contribution. Nevertheless, we also figured out some critical elements. It is very important that such a system is not to be used as a tool to put pressure on the employees or for surveillance but to offer support and guidance. In addition to the prototype, in practice, an authorization system for the desktop component is highly requested. It should be possible to assign different permissions to the levels in a company’s hierarchy so that, for example, only a division leader can edit workflows. Another crucial factor is the deployed hardware. In the domain of smartwatches, handling is a big discussion due to the small display. Reducing the displayed information and interactive elements to the minimum necessary this limitation can be circumvented. Industrial environments make tough demands on smartwatches. Today’s devices offer adequate battery life and are often water- and dust-resistant. But the wristband is prone to acids and the display can get inoperable contaminated, e.g., with oil. For many industrial cases, the manufacturers have to improve the durability of their devices to make them fully convenient.
As with any practice-oriented research study, some limitations exist: First, the empirical foundation of the developed meta-artifact is merely based on the quality assurance scenario. To address this limitation, we aim at transferring smartActivity to more use cases, though due to the paradigm of low-interaction, short-term and proactive use of smartwatches, there is a narrow field of application (Dvorak 2007). However, we verified the utility of smartwatches in a service system of a quality assurance scenario. According to the interviews, maintenance or support scenarios are promising. Employees who are widely dispersed over the company can at any time receive requests while using their hands for their proper work. Even non-collaborative workflows are possible, in which employees are just guided through a complex sequence of tasks, and they can make sure not to miss any step. To cover these new use cases, specific requirements have to be met. Second, our evaluation is limited as the participants of the evaluation could only test the application for a short time-frame. Hence, we want to conduct a long-term evaluation in the future to get detailed insights into the impact of smartwatches on the employees’ work.
Nevertheless, for practice, we created an applicable software solution for many scenarios. We introduce new technologies to support employees in workflows. This helps companies to keep pace with the
competition through the consolidation of employees. Within the research domain, we created a level 1 design science contribution (Gregor / Hevner 2013) in order to address the stated quality assurance scenario in practice. The presented meta-prototype forms the entrance to a level 2 contribution, identifying design guidelines by extension, application, and evaluation to more use cases. The accumulated insights and knowledge can help to understand how to integrate smartwatches into the industrial context and how to design mobile information systems based on smartwatches to support employees in workflows. For a proper level 2 design science contribution, including design principles, we need to traverse another design science cycle in order to generalize findings.
2 Support
The Smartwatch Applicability Framework: Adoption of a Smartwatch-based Information System Assisting Support Employees
Abstract: During the last decades, wearable computers emerged as an innovative and promising technology. Though most of the representatives have not yet reached market maturity, smartwatches hit the consumer market due to the accessibility of affordable devices and predominant acceptance caused by the large similarity to common wristwatches. Besides, recent research studies showed that smartwatches could support mobile employees in collaborative business-related scenarios through permanent availability, unobtrusiveness, and hands-free operation. In this paper, we focus on support employees and analyze three representative scenarios with practical relevance. These are composed of immediate support and routine maintenance processes. During a software development process, we design and implement a smartwatch-based software artifact to address the scenario inherent problems and a broad range of support use cases. It is then used as a foundation for a mixed-methods field study in which we focus on the adoption of smartwatches. We first evaluate the software artifact within the scenarios. Second, we elaborate on enabling and inhibiting factors for the adoption of smartwatch-based information systems to support employees based on the TOEI framework. And finally, we derive the Smartwatch Applicability Framework intended for companies to check their scenarios for the applicability of smartwatches.
Keywords: Adoption, TOE Framework, Smartwatch, Support, Smartwatch Applicability Framework Citation: (Zenker et al. 2020b, study 2) Zenker, S.; Rach, S.; Hobert, S.: The Smartwatch Applicability Framework: Adoption of a Smartwatch-based Information System Assisting Support Employees. In:
Proceedings of the 28th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS). Marrakech, Morocco 2020, 1–16.
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2.1 Introduction
During the last decades, wearable computers emerged as an innovative and promising technology due to their unique characteristics. The continuous increase in sales of wearable computers is currently significantly driven by smartwatches, which are forecasted to represent 64 % of total sales of wearables in 2022 (IDC 2018). One reason that smartwatches already hit the consumer market can be found in the public acceptance of these devices caused by the familiarity of common wristwatches and the experience of well-being while wearing them (Wu et al. 2016; Jung et al. 2016). In addition to that, the potential and utility of smartwatches for the corporate context was also emphasized in the last decade.
Many dynamic processes necessitate high mobility, ubiquitous access to the digital workplace, and collaboration of employees. Especially, workflows, including manual work, disqualify the occupation of employees’ hands with hand-held devices like smartphones or tablets (Kortuem et al. 1999;
Billinghurst / Starner 1999). Smartwatches provide permanent availability, easy observation, unobtrusiveness, easy handling, and portability on the body, allowing almost hands-free operation, especially for receiving information (Ziegler et al. 2015) and hence met these requirements. They even can be used in a variety of demanding scenarios in which other hands-free devices like headsets reach their limit due to, e.g., high noise in production and the lack of reliable speech recognition for human-computer interaction.
Despite these potential benefits for enterprises, smartwatches are still rarely used by companies indicating low adoption and diffusion. One reason might be that smartwatches are frequently only seen as an accessory instead of a useful tool (Krey et al. 2016). Underlying influencing factors for the adoption of smartwatches in the corporate context might be important for researchers and managers to improve the understanding of which factors contribute to the adoption of this new technology. Getting a deeper understanding of the adoption can support the design and introduction processes of smartwatches in companies. Due to the promising utility of smartwatches, it is expected that smartwatches might have a beneficial impact to support employees by improving the efficiency of workflows. This can finally become an economic factor in terms of saving time and money (Ziegler et al. 2014). In previous studies and supported by many interviews with domain experts from the industry, especially the utility of smartwatches for support employees was emphasized (Zenker / Hobert 2019, study 1). Thus, we investigate support scenarios in this paper with the superordinate intend to assess influencing factors enabling and inhibiting the adoption of smartwatch-based IS in the corporate context. For that, we address the following three research questions:
RQ1: How to utilize and adapt a smartwatch-based information system in IT support processes?
RQ2: How do employees evaluate the artifact, and what are the enabling and inhibiting factors for an adoption?
RQ 3: How can companies evaluate corporate scenarios for the applicability of smartwatches?
To answer these research questions, the remainder of this article is structured as follows: First, we present definitions of basic terms and outline related research and practice in section 2.2. Second, we describe our research method, including a mixed-method approach in section 2.3. By applying the research framework to our problem domain, we illustrate the design and evaluation of our artifact in section 2.4. The focus of this work is the subsequent elaboration of enabling and inhibiting influences of the adoption of smartwatch-based IS within the support scenario inspired by the TOEI framework (Rosli et al. 2012; Hoong / Marthandan 2014) in section 2.5. In section 2.6, we process our findings into the Smartwatch Applicability Framework, which can be used by companies to evaluate whether their scenarios and workflows can benefit from an application of smartwatches. Finally, we discuss our results and outline our research contributions for theory and practice in section 2.7.