Digitization of manufacturing companies: Employee acceptance towards mobile and wearable devices

In the production environment, digital assistance systems become more important as an interface between human and machines. Considering implementation processes of new technologies, like mobile and wearable devices, employee acceptance is crucial. The research objective is to describe the current level of acceptance of production staff and to reveal the influencing factors for technology acceptance towards mobile and wearable devices in manufacturing environment. The impact of the degree of familiarity with the medium is of particular interest, because of the first-time implementation of devices that are already conversant from private surroundings, such as smartphones. The research method features an explorative, qualitative interview approach to examine complex attitude and decision-making processes in a theory-generating way. The qualitative content analysis implies differences between familiar and fairly unknown devices. Further results reveal several influencing factors such as robustness, wearing comfort, customizability, support of management or data protection that should be considered in implementation strategies.