Remote Assistance through Augmented Reality for the Electric Power Workforce

The utilities workforce plays an important role for the daily functioning and running of a city. For this reason increasing its efficiency and improving its services with technological trends, proves to be a very effective solution for both the utility and the society. Since Augmented Reality (AR) presents a large number of applicabilities and it is being used more and more for industrial purposes, it can be implemented by using it to support employees' communication and assistances. This paper aims to evaluate this applicability of AR to Remote Assistance (RA). It will present a practical use case by an R&D project, named Urban Futurability, developed in a Brazilian Electrical Distribution Company, where the main system used for the RA is the Microsoft Dynamics Remote Assist. Innovative functionalities are evaluated according to the results brought by the early RA application. Furthermore, the paper brings an initial cost benefit analysis for its application, aiming for a roll out implementation based on the Return of Investment (ROI).