Using Smart Glasses to Support Situated Decision Making in Aquaculture

The rapidly expanding prawn farming industry is vital in providing high-quality protein for the increasing global population. The key to consistently high yield is the efficient and effective management of pond water, maintaining the optimal growth environment. Our consultations with seven Australian commercial prawn farms found that the lack of access to essential real-time water information and trends has hindered farmers from making confident and timely decisions while in the field, which contributes considerably to either prolonged suboptimal pond conditions or increases in operational costs. This paper describes two aquaculture pond water management tasks that can benefit from wearable technology and discusses general concerns about using smart eyewear in harsh outdoor farming environments. A Pondside Visualisation System was created to allow farmers to access visualised historical and real-time water data during field operations using Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2. The application uses a new data visualisation style that is optimised for small near-eye displays. A validation study was conducted with seven industrial practitioners (including a supervisor and six farm technicians) on a commercial farm with real data from the recent growing season, where each technician made 100 pond management decisions using our system. Objective measurements of task completion time and task accuracy indicated the farmers achieved an accuracy of 86.4% and 89.2% for two management tasks with at least 41.0% less time compared to existing desktop-based practice. A structured expert review confirmed the usability of our system and discussed methods to mitigate issues discovered during the study. We also discussed lessons learned from the project.