Protecting Supply Chain Workers with IIoT: Safety Solutions During a Pandemic

This excerpt was taken from an article originally published to ElectronicProducts.com.

Presence detection and social-distancing PPE in factories during a pandemic
Equipping an industrial facility with facility-based presence-detection solutions is beneficial for traditional safety and security concerns and can assist with social distancing and contagion mitigation in a general occupancy sense. These solutions and their benefits were broadly discussed in a prior installation of this series (see “Intelligent presence detection for commercial building automation”).

Adding touchless interaction with machinery, either through speech recognition or facial authentication, can be beneficial in terms of contagion mitigation by limiting a person’s need to touch a potentially infectious surface. However, in order to facilitate productivity in environments that typically require high degrees of physical labor and, often, physical interaction between employees and with operating equipment, a dedicated solution must be considered.

It is possible to deploy such a solution using only equipment that can be outfitted around the facility, that is, without requiring some type of wearable device for each employee. However, such a solution would need to be quite sophisticated, requiring highly accurate facial-recognition technologies. This type of equipment is likely to be cost-prohibitive, particularly given the number of edge nodes that would be required for deployment around a large facility, as well as the amount of data that would be collected, transmitted, and processed.

Wearable technologies equipped with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) provide the most comprehensive solution for both real-time social-distancing enforcement and automated contact tracing. Each device emits a BLE signal, and the strength of the signal can be used to calculate the proximity between devices. This is effective for a number of use cases. Primarily, it can be used to alert two employees when they are within an unsafe distance from each other, and in that way, it can decrease the risk of contact transmission in the workplace environment.

It may also be prudent to trace surfaces and touchpoints around the facility that are potentially infectious as well. This can be achieved by equipping BLE beacons around the facility as well, creating a “map” of each person’s movements and potential surface interactions throughout the facility. Embedded edge processing can provide first-level signal and data filtering, as well as manage data transmission.

Read the full article on ElectronicProducts.com: Keeping supply-chain workers safe requires more than presence detection