An IoT-Based Mobile System for Safety Monitoring of Lone Workers

The European Agency for Safety and Health at Work considers Smart Personal Protective Equipment as “Intelligent Protection For The Future”. It mainly consists of electronic components that collect data about their use, the workers who wear them, and the working environment. This paper proposes a distributed solution of Smart Personal Protective Equipment for the safety monitoring of Lone Workers by adopting low-cost electronic devices. In addition to the same hazards as anyone else, Lone Workers need additional and specific systems due to the higher risk they run on a work site. To this end, the Edge-Computing paradigm can be adopted to deploy an architecture embedding wearable devices, which alerts safety managers when workers do not wear the prescribed Personal Protective Equipment and supports a fast rescue when a worker seeks help or an accidental fall is automatically detected. The proposed system is a work-in-progress which provides an architecture design to accommodate different requirements, namely the deployment difficulties at temporary and large working sites, the maintenance and connectivity recurring cost issues, the respect for the workers’ privacy, and the simplicity of use for workers and their supervisors.