Augmenting the industrial Internet of Things with Emojis

Technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR) and Fog Computing permeate more and more areas of our daily lives. These technologies are used in various domains such as eHealth, Gaming and Smart Cities. However, within the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), these technologies are slowly finding their way into the market, although they can be drivers of resource efficient and sustainable production economies. By combining these technologies with shared knowledge resources, such as Emojis, new interactions within the industrial domain can be created. These simplify the analysis of conditions of industrial machines and allow the derivation of preventive maintenance measures. In recent years, an increasing number of IoT devices has been observed in the industrial environment. However, the large number of sensors and actuators in industrial plants also pose challenges for employees. Augmented Reality enables new interaction scenarios to facilitate the daily work of employees by presenting machine states in a new way. Emojis and graphs are options for visualizing these states. Downtimes can be reduced by viewing and analyzing the data. The saving of seconds or minutes has a real impact on the business and is of great interest. In this paper, we describe the approach of Augmenting IIoT devices with Emojis to visualize states and conditions of production lines. We present a prototype that we have implemented, our experiences with it as well as the challenges we have uncovered.