While the consumer applications of IoT are likely to gain the most attention, one area that showing strong growth in the uptake of IoT devices is workplace safety.
Workplace safety costs organizations billions every year, and industries with particularly hazardous working environments such as Construction, Oil & Gas, Mining, Utilities have started to acquire IoT technology to help minimize risk and address curable threats. In addition, as the COVID-19 crisis expands around us, the phenomenon of ‘social distancing’ and remote working has evolved to assist avoid risk of infection.
There are numerous interesting ways we can utilize data and sensors to assure that occupancy rates stay below 50% or that specific employees stay 6 feet apart from one another; they could even be utilized to develop AI that can recognize coughs and sneezes in the workforce.
Physiological monitoring
Wearable technology is utilized to analyze a worker’s physiological state in real-time. One of the Japanese wearable tech company Mitsufuji is now developing in this space, producing smart clothes woven from silver-metallised fibres that gather a range of data about its wearer, containing heart rate and body temperature.
Other examples involve wristbands with bio-sensors to precisely calculate stress levels and glasses that recognize eye movements to rectify fatigue and intervals of micro-sleep.
Secure Workplace
The current pandemic crisis situation pushes us towards more innovative solutions. Just imagine if there was a more powerful and flexible solution to assure social distancing from other workers? And what if you could also sustain the data into a platform for monitoring their movements?
In that way, if anyone becomes ill, you would be capable to track his or her steps, interactions or collisions with other workers. Then the whole contact chain could be informed and asked to self-quarantine.
The solution to this is an Internet of Things (IoT) device utilizing beacon technology which is not dependent upon apps. The device is bluetooth-powered and can recognize close faces (and possible collisions) based on the distance between other devices.
It gives an alert notification when a worker gets within the specified two metre radius. In that way social distancing at our workplace will become little bit easier and simpler.
Smart Devices
Workers would be instructed to wear them, as they are attached along with ID and other devices already, and only the relative distance to other devices is being traced when they are actually wearing them at work. Because the device is easily visible, everyone interprets and can see that the wearers and the factory are attaching to safety protocols.
Every device owner is recognized at handover, workers are only tracked with respect to the relative distance to others when they are wearing the badge. This resolves initial privacy concerns.
With data accumulation and analysis done by IoT platforms, you can easily notice and prove that your employees are working under secure conditions – for assent as well as peace of mind.
Recently a company Density utilizes door-mounted sensors to trace the number of people in a room or building and give alerts if that number exceeds a particular amount. On the other side, there are ceiling-mounted sensors, such as those from Enlighted that can trace occupancy and social distancing.
Taken together, these IoT innovations (https://www.hiotron.com/) are supporting to increase workplace safety on various fronts. Now is the time to start investing in IoT technology that can assure safety of your organization’s most precious asset: your workers.
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