Towards ambient communication support for power grid maintenance and repair

In the power industry various companies have a crucial responsibility of sustaining infrastructure for electricity service. Maintenance and repair of electrical devices out in the field is potentially dangerous and sometimes complicated in nature. Effective and safe fieldwork requires clear and accurate communication between fieldworkers repairing and maintaining devices outdoors and operators monitoring and controlling the power grid in a control room. Operators and fieldworkers have to synchronize their activities for maintaining steady electricity service. Current Information and Communication Technology (ICT) support for fieldwork consist of mobile phones, mobile software applications and workforce management systems, but much of the necessary communication is still conducted orally over the phone. We propose ambient communication support that improves communication between operators and fieldworkers by digitalizing and automating trivial messaging. The concept is based on mobile navigation and work order management application, image-processing techniques for wearable sensor based activity recognition methods. In theory we can eliminate three of eight logical steps in a typical work scenario. We present work-in-progress in form of preliminary prototypes and discuss the technological advances needed to make the concept real.