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As industrial activities, particularly in sectors like mining and oil & gas, increasingly take place in harsher climates and remoter regions of the world, risks to workers’ health and safety rise. Aside from the tough environment, should an incident occur, company staff out on site may be a very long way from the nearest proper healthcare facility.
In developing countries with poorer infrastructure, transporting workers out to receive medical attention may not be straightforward. And in the developed world, while the quality of healthcare and provision of emergency services may not be an issue, legislation plus more evolved corporate social responsibility requires companies to pay close attention to assuring workplace health and safety.
Here in Asia Pacific, it’s well known that summer down under in Australia brings sizzling temperatures and intense sunshine, which increases the risk of heatstroke, especially for those physically exerting themselves outside. Looking to boost the safety of its workers in this environment, engineering and construction company Laing O’Rourke recently trialled wearable-based IIoT technology to give early warning of dangerous situations.
In the wearable world, fitness trackers on the wrist are by now familiar, and other examples of the wearable trend include smart watches, smart glasses, and smart clothing – see Ralph Lauren’s $295 PoloTech t-shirt, which can sense and transmit heart rate, breathing depth, calories burned, and other physiological metrics. Meanwhile in industry, there are many potential applications for wearable technology and Laing O’Rourke’s deployment of smart hardhats is a good example of what can be achieved.
In this smart hardhat, a sweatband sensor array monitors the worker’s body temperature, heart rate, location and orientation as well as the external temperature and humidity. Data is transmitted via ZigBee to a central gateway and then to the Microsoft’s cloud based Azure IoT Suite platform and Power BI analytics software via 3G M2M industrial router.
With the system in operation, in addition to sound and vibration alerts delivered to the wearer, Laing O’Rourke gets real-time monitoring capability of the conditions faced by its workers on site and is proactively alerted if someone starts to show signs of heatstroke or a team is spending an excessive amount of time in the sun. With the sensing and communication kit retrofitted to any existing hardhat, the utility of that humble but essential piece of safety equipment increases significantly.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in Australia, in the mining industry, RioTinto is taking sensing to another level by monitoring workers’ brains. While that does sound rather sinister and Orwellian, it’s actually an initiative to prevent accidents by addressing fatigue levels of the company’s dump-truck drivers.
The SmartCap developed by Brisbane’s SmartCap Technologies looks like a regular baseball cap except it includes technology to provide indication of the wearer’s fatigue by measuring the brain’s electroencephalogram (EEG) activity.
This fatigue information is available locally to the wearer via a display unit and can also be transmitted to a central location for supervisory and aggregate level monitoring. Perhaps not surprisingly, the 1am to 5am proves to be the critical time when fatigue is most likely to occur and microsleep kicks in.
Aside from RioTinto, miners Anglo American and Newcrest Mining are deploying SmartCap, and more than 1000 of these intelligent caps are now in use across Australia and also in the Americas and parts of Africa, helping to reduce fatigue related incidents through early warning alarms and enhanced understanding of fatigue dynamics.
So it's hats off (or rather, better keep them on) to both these heady innovations. And expect to see more applications and deployments of wearable IIoT technology out in industry.
In developing countries with poorer infrastructure, transporting workers out to receive medical attention may not be straightforward. And in the developed world, while the quality of healthcare and provision of emergency services may not be an issue, legislation plus more evolved corporate social responsibility requires companies to pay close attention to assuring workplace health and safety.
Here in Asia Pacific, it’s well known that summer down under in Australia brings sizzling temperatures and intense sunshine, which increases the risk of heatstroke, especially for those physically exerting themselves outside. Looking to boost the safety of its workers in this environment, engineering and construction company Laing O’Rourke recently trialled wearable-based IIoT technology to give early warning of dangerous situations.
In the wearable world, fitness trackers on the wrist are by now familiar, and other examples of the wearable trend include smart watches, smart glasses, and smart clothing – see Ralph Lauren’s $295 PoloTech t-shirt, which can sense and transmit heart rate, breathing depth, calories burned, and other physiological metrics. Meanwhile in industry, there are many potential applications for wearable technology and Laing O’Rourke’s deployment of smart hardhats is a good example of what can be achieved.
In this smart hardhat, a sweatband sensor array monitors the worker’s body temperature, heart rate, location and orientation as well as the external temperature and humidity. Data is transmitted via ZigBee to a central gateway and then to the Microsoft’s cloud based Azure IoT Suite platform and Power BI analytics software via 3G M2M industrial router.
With the system in operation, in addition to sound and vibration alerts delivered to the wearer, Laing O’Rourke gets real-time monitoring capability of the conditions faced by its workers on site and is proactively alerted if someone starts to show signs of heatstroke or a team is spending an excessive amount of time in the sun. With the sensing and communication kit retrofitted to any existing hardhat, the utility of that humble but essential piece of safety equipment increases significantly.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in Australia, in the mining industry, RioTinto is taking sensing to another level by monitoring workers’ brains. While that does sound rather sinister and Orwellian, it’s actually an initiative to prevent accidents by addressing fatigue levels of the company’s dump-truck drivers.
The SmartCap developed by Brisbane’s SmartCap Technologies looks like a regular baseball cap except it includes technology to provide indication of the wearer’s fatigue by measuring the brain’s electroencephalogram (EEG) activity.
This fatigue information is available locally to the wearer via a display unit and can also be transmitted to a central location for supervisory and aggregate level monitoring. Perhaps not surprisingly, the 1am to 5am proves to be the critical time when fatigue is most likely to occur and microsleep kicks in.
Aside from RioTinto, miners Anglo American and Newcrest Mining are deploying SmartCap, and more than 1000 of these intelligent caps are now in use across Australia and also in the Americas and parts of Africa, helping to reduce fatigue related incidents through early warning alarms and enhanced understanding of fatigue dynamics.
So it's hats off (or rather, better keep them on) to both these heady innovations. And expect to see more applications and deployments of wearable IIoT technology out in industry.