Logistics offers opportunities to use wearable devices.

• Author: Insinna, Valerie

As the aerospace industry more widely adopts wearable devices such as Google Glass, it's likely the Defense Department and military services will follow dose on its heels, predicted the head of product management for IFS Aerospace and Defense.

"I've seen a lot of hardware providers create the ruggedized devices that we tend to see in defense and aerospace," Brendan Viggers told National Defense. His employer, IFS, is a United Kingdom-based company that specializes in enterprise software and logistics for defense and other industries. "These are devices that can be dropped, can get wet, can work in humid or hot conditions. Those are available off the shelf today."

Japan Airlines, for one, is employing Glass for airplane inspections, he said. Engineers on the tarmac will wear the devices to transmit imagery to maintenance specialists.

Maintenance and logistics are also prime areas for the military to begin integrating wearable technologies, Viggers added. For example, a worker in a warehouse could use a wrist-mounted device with a touch screen and a barcode reader embedded on a finger scanner to count stock and do quality inspections. "He can literally scan his finger across the barcode and that goes to a screen that's on his wrist," he said.

This would not only cut down the time taken to complete a task, but it could also improve accuracy, Viggers said. "You're not doing paper-based records anymore, you're recording what you're doing electronically straight away on...