IoT enhances work safety

A district heating producer relies on a simple and efficient alerting solution with IoT to increase the occupational safety of its employees in the event of a medical emergency.

Initial situation

Due to home offices and advancing digitalization, fewer and fewer employees are directly on site to monitor the operation of production facilities. Most plants are automated and operated remotely. As a result, employees are increasingly alone on site to perform necessary maintenance work.

Requirement

A district heating producer in central Switzerland was also confronted with this challenge. Depending on the on-call schedule and when working on weekends or at night, hours or even days can pass before it would be noticed that an employee suddenly needed medical assistance on site. In the case of an incident on Friday evening, it can take up to 2.5 days until someone notices something.

Solution

In order to increase the safety of the employee on site and to be able to call for medical assistance more quickly if the employee himself is no longer able to call for help independently, employees now wear an IoT alarm button on their belt or wrist. The device is activated before the employee goes to work. From this point on, the employee must acknowledge the alarm button at regular intervals during the work assignment, as is the case, for example, with train drivers using the dead man's pedal. If the alarm button is not acknowledged within the defined time interval, a defined alarm chain is automatically triggered via Tesenso IoT core. The alarm scenario has a multi-stage structure in order to suppress any false alarms.

Added value

Thanks to the IoT alarm button, the district heating operator has a low-cost and effective alarming solution and can thus increase the occupational safety of its employees. The alarm chain has been set up in such a way that an alarm is triggered even if the person on site would no longer be able to send a message himself.

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