Advances in AI are shaping the future of work, but how can we ensure that employees, organizations, and society will benefit from the changes? Instead of automating tasks, which can reduce or eliminate the need for human workers, this project seeks to design smart hand tools that leverage embedded sensing, the Internet of Things, and AI. These capabilities provide real-time feedback, improve predictive capacity, and support task effectiveness, which empowers workers to accomplish more while keeping their jobs secure. Smart hand tools will help address the middle-skill worker gap by improving workers’ safety in trades such as welding and enable more equitable access to jobs by minimizing the amount of training needed and promoting usability across workers with a wide range of ages and abilities.
This project is supported by funding from Microsoft.