A Lightweight Application for Reading Digital Measurement and Inputting Condition Assessment in Manufacturing Industry

Abstract

There is a vast need for the use of digital display instruments in the manufacturing industry due to the simple operation and high precision. In addition to the numerical data acquisition, it is usually necessary to input additional text for the condition assessment as well. However, since most of these measure instruments do not provide any interfaces for users to access the values and it often lacks proper devices to input the text during the working process, these two tasks are highly human intensive under current conditions. In order to facilitate the smooth running of the work for operators, we propose a lightweight application which can be installed on smartphones or wearable devices using multidigit recognition and speech recognition techniques without changing too much of their workflow. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach can achieve high accuracy. Thus, the proposed solution can effectively resolve data input issues in the manufacturing sites, thereby reducing human labor, increasing productivity, and automating part of the process. Taking operators’ existing workflow into consideration for design can provide an application with an easy learning curve. Moreover, with the rapid and economical approach, companies can financially benefit from the development of this low-cost application, especially for small- and medium-sized enterprises.