Written by Matthew Inniger of Manager of the  Advanced Technology Program of CIFT, part of  Ohio MEP. This article first appeared on the NIST Manufacturing Innovation Blog. 

This is an exciting time in the food manufacturing industry. The innovations and technology associated with Industry 4.0 are making it easier for small and medium-sized manufacturers to overcome obstacles in ways that at one point would not have been considered. While manufacturers have previously been slower to move toward incorporating advanced industry technologies due to the high level of regulation and biologically complex products with which they work, innovation is becoming more widely accepted as a key to industry sustainability. Two examples of such Industry 4.0 technologies are automation and augmented reality.

Knowledge transfer for new employees is often the bottleneck to effective and efficient onboarding and can be a major source of downtime when the right knowledge is unavailable on-site. The RealWear HMT-1 provides solutions to these problems, and more, in an intuitive and safe way.