Digital Resiliency through Augmented Reality

The original Benjamin Franklin quote, "If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail" rings true, especially in a post-covid era. In the spring of 2020, as the country shuttered its schools and businesses, water and wastewater utilities across the nation were forced to invoke their Emergency Response Plans and Continuity of Operations Plans to ensure our nation's critical infrastructure remained operational. Granted, these plans were successful and solidified the value of resiliency planning, however they also revealed a significant gap with respect to digital resiliency planning. Digital resilience relies upon enlisting technology planning and emerging digital solutions to ensure business continuity and safeguard operations. Although the traditional resiliency planning successfully ensured continued operations, most utilities were not adequately prepared for the digital requirements to send non-essential staff home to work. Telecommuting infrastructure (networks, mobile devices, etc.) was generally lacking for most utilities, and while traditional telecommuting tools are not practical for the Operations & Maintenance staff, proper digital resiliency planning can ensure sustainable and safe operation for all staff, now and well-beyond COVID. Although most frontline workers at treatment facilities have to be on-site to maintain and operate the critical infrastructure, Operators and Maintenance staff can still leverage leading-edge tools, such as Augmented Reality (AR) and knowledge management systems to safeguard quality operations and their own personal safety. This new breed of personal and portable computing technologies enables workers to view and interact with digital information in a hands-free manner. Using wearable devices, the user is delivered a first-person perspective of virtual information, such as text and images, with the surrounding physical environment to receive context-specific data and knowledge. This ultimately provides frontline workers with a first-person perspective of all relevant resources, including manuals, operating procedures, and even video, right at their fingertips.
Key Takeaways: Strengthening digital resiliency using AR yields numerous benefits to the Utility industry, including the following:
- Emergency response and quality performance
- Institutional knowledge capture and transfer
- Empowering the Next Generation of Utility experts
- Remote viewing, communication and support