When it comes to workplace safety, the first impression of many people would be wearing protective equipment, paying attention to the gestures and noise levels, and other written guidelines. With the advancement of technology, there are already a lot of technological equipment and systems that can ensure our safety at work.
Wearable Technology
As the name suggests, wearable technology refers to the new inventions that we can wear as accessories. The most common examples of it are smartwatches and smart glasses. These smart accessories can measure employees’ physiological data such as heartbeat, temperature, and respiration, to send alerts when the employees are fatigued or stressed.
For the work environment, some wearable devices provide environmental monitoring and proximity protection for the employees, some might be installed in the personal protective equipment (PPE) to reduce the burden on the employees. Whenever the employees are approaching somewhere dangerous, such as nearby a vehicle, an overheat zone, or a toxic gas area, the sensor on the PPE will detect the physical location of the employees immediately and send alerts to them.
Wearable technologies are now becoming more and more common along with the invention of smartphones, it is believed that our lives will be safer if technology could protect us in the form of accessories.
Application for workplace safety
In the previous articles, we have introduced applications that provide safety support for us in different aspects. Undoubtedly, there are some applications developed to ensure the safety of workers in different industries.
Worker Safety Pro is one of the safety applications developed by Fall Safety company, which includes the functions of accident detection and prevention, activeness monitoring, and check-in reminders for workers. The application is available on smartphones or smartwatches so that the tilt sensors of these devices can be used to detect the motion of the workers. If the workers fell carelessly, the application will immediately detect the change of tilt of the workers, an emergency call interface will then pop up on the smartwatch or smartphone so that the workers may call for help. The application is especially helpful for construction, manufacturing, and warehouse workers. If the application is widely used in these industries, the cases of workplace accidents will surely be lowered.
VR training
Employee training is important to ensure employees’ safety. If an employee knows the correct SOP of their work, the potential danger will be minimized. However, it is somehow costly and risky to let employees receive training in the real working environment, especially for industries like the medical field, mining industry, or construction industry. Serious accidents could happen if the employees made mistakes during training in the real workplace.
In this case, Virtual Reality (VR) technology helps provide training support for the employees. Virtual reality provides a realistic workplace simulation for the employees to finish different tasks. With the eye-tracking technology, the device may accurately capture where the user is looking, so that the sight of the simulated world will move along accordingly, making the simulation more realistic.
A recent example of VR training application in the workplace is the medical field, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the medical staff is required to be more careful with their PPE, hand washing, and other SOP. Also, because of the pandemic, the overflowing hospitals are hard to provide real workplace placement opportunities for the nursing students. Therefore, a nursing workplace simulation is developed to let the students gain real-world experience.
The VR training includes instructions on how to wear PPE, wash hands properly, how to provide treatment to patients, and even how to inject vaccines or collect blood samples for the patients. If the new employees are trained with VR before actually working in the hospital, the risk of medical accidents will be decreased, and the nurses may provide better medical service for the patients.
Computer vision used in workplace safety
Speaking of the new technology trends, computer vision would be the most discussed and adopted technology nowadays. Even in the workplace, there are different computer vision systems used to ensure the workers’ safety and prevent accidents.
Everguard.ai is an Irvine, California-based joint venture that provides computer vision monitoring systems to companies. With the Everguard system, the computer vision camera may analyze the captured images, data, and potential danger within a second. If a worker walks too close to dangerous objects such as a loaded truck or overheated machines, the system will detect it and send alerts to the intellectual wearable devices of both the workers and the machine operators, then both of them can stop moving to prevent accidents from happening.
Apart from protecting employees from large and dangerous objects, fire protection is also important. Some workers might work in a flammable environment and accidents usually happened unconsciously. With the help of computer vision, when there is fire, the color of fire can be classified by the system with the captured images of the workplace. If the system detected the image of flame and sensed a high temperature, a warning will be sent to the security and the fire sprinkler will then be automatically triggered to stop the fire. If the fire is very serious, or even unstoppable by the regular fire sprinkler, the system may even contact the fire department automatically. Not only the fire detection system with computer vision technology is helpful in the dangerous work zones, but they are also helpful in tracking down fire accidents in accommodations, hotels, and clubhouses.
Workplace safety is extremely important, apart from providing employees with standard safety protocol, the above equipment and technology can also be used to further ensure the safety of workers. Motherapp is also running projects about safety measurements, if you are looking for related solutions, feel free to contact us too!
Now you have read all 4 articles about how technology made our lives better and safer, which is also the motto of Motherapp, we are looking forward to making great use of our strength and profession to make our world a better and safer place for everyone to live in. If you would like to know more about us, please feel free to check out our other case studies and insights.
Read the whole series: Morden Technology Development – 4 article series about technologies for better life