Industrial occupational health and safety: efficient technologies and arising challenges

– Which technologies help to improve industrial OHS and reduce the risk of injuries? Which of these technologies do you consider to be most effective and promising for implementation?

There are quite a lot of technologies and means that fit this description: for example, robotised systems, video analytics systems, physical access control systems, monitoring and industrial accidents prevention systems, safety equipment and safety instrumental panels, as well as training of personnel. Given the danger of industrial processes and importance of accident prevention means at each production stage, the most efficient way for improving operational health and safety is the use of comprehensive integrated approach. For instance, implementation of robotized systems in combination with monitoring and video analytics systems improves safety by identification of potential threats and timely response to them. If these technological solutions are combined with the proper training of personnel, then injuries and accidents can be avoided and prevented. Therefore, only comprehensive integrated approach to OHS at production sites that combines methodologies, systems and technologies can lead to a proper safety level at the facility.

– Which technologies help to improve industrial OHS and reduce the risk of injuries? Which of these technologies do you consider to be most effective and promising for implementation?

There are quite a lot of technologies and means that fit this description: for example, robotised systems, video analytics systems, physical access control systems, monitoring and industrial accidents prevention systems, safety equipment and safety instrumental panels, as well as training of personnel. Given the danger of industrial processes and importance of accident prevention means at each production stage, the most efficient way for improving operational health and safety is the use of comprehensive integrated approach. For instance, implementation of robotized systems in combination with monitoring and video analytics systems improves safety by identification of potential threats and timely response to them. If these technological solutions are combined with the proper training of personnel, then injuries and accidents can be avoided and prevented. Therefore, only comprehensive integrated approach to OHS at production sites that combines methodologies, systems and technologies can lead to a proper safety level at the facility.

– Which technologies and solutions for OHS based on your experience are the most in demand at the present time for major clients, and why?

Analysing current inquiries and requests from clients, we observe an increase in demand for the solutions based on video analytics. Robotised systems, physical access control systems and other solutions, however, are also in demand, but we observe a trend for implementation of systems that ensure control of industrial OHS specifically performed via video analytics.

We observe the largest demand for systems that control the use of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) – from such tasks as monitoring the presence of PPE to the tasks that require to examine the correct PPE use and monitor actions performed by the personnel. These systems are relatively inexpensive, can be adapted to specific conditions of the implementation site and specific objectives that need to be addressed, and most importantly, can utilise overview cameras that are already installed at the production facilities.

– What impact does digitisation of production and business processes have on decrease in the number of injuries and improvement of working conditions? Can you touch on the risks of digitization in this area? Can you provide some examples?

The production plants always perform economic and financial assessment when making any type of decisions, as almost all other types of businesses. However, when concerning about operational safety and people’s lives, monetary justification and assessment most often take a second place. Therefore, each system that helps to reduce the risk of injury or lethal accident even at a marginal level should be considered as a significant achievement of production plant digitisation. This, essentially, highlights a direction for further improvements.
Digitisation of OHS enables to detect and prevent dangerous incidents. For instance, let us consider a case when a member of personnel comes closely to the hazardous area for which a person must have the complete set of the PPE. Video analytics system detects the presence and correct use of PPE, and in a case of detected violations does not allow personnel access to the hazardous area or informs bodies who are responsible for OHS.

Another example can be presented in form of a system that manages operation of the equipment at the production facility which does not allow to activate a certain machinery or production line while a member of personnel performs maintenance, upgrade or any other type of work.

It also should be noted that a decrease of operational expenditures can also be a result of OHS digitisation. Firstly, decrease in the number of injuries leads to a reduction of compensation and insurance premium payments amount by the enterprise. Secondly, in the event of industrial accident which have led to injuries, the accident investigation procedure always requires substantial time and temporary shutdown of production. Because such shutdowns most often lead to substantial financial losses due to not utilisation of the machinery capacity to the full extend, an implementation of digitised means for OHS, as a result, have positive externalities both in social and financial domains.

– Which trends are currently observed for the major facilities of the infrastructure? Can you please list the major trends, and name factors that prevents wider technological implementation in this area?

First of all, we observe an increase in the range of tasks that enterprises need to address with video analytics. Just a couple of years ago we only received the requests for detection of hard hats and entry into hazardous area. Now, however, we see an increase in the number of PPE types that need to be monitored together with increase in demand for control of technological and production processes, actions performed by personnel, industrial accidents and detection of firearms in the camera frame.

The second trend is requests for creating comprehensive platform for video analytics which becomes more and more competitive with an older generation of solutions based on video management systems (VMS) which historically requires much larger number of inputs and attention of system operators to manage such systems.

Additionally, uniformity of classical video surveillance systems in the conditions of industrial production facilities makes the support, scaling up and development of such systems much more challenging. For instance, enterprises may utilise one system for the control of the physical access to the facility, another system for the control of PPE at the production plant, third – for control of the machinery and heavy equipment exit from the warehouse, and so on. New generation of platforms for video analytics are the comprehensive solutions for monitoring, access control and accident prevention for the entire facility.

And the final third trend that we observe is the demand of production facilities for means and tools that would allow them without deep dive into specifics of machine learning to address goals for improving OHS with the use of video analytics, and also adapt already implemented systems to the unique conditions of new implementation sites. Essentially it is a combination of building blocks that enable to perform additional training of the detection and recognition algorithms directly at the facility.

Published in June-July 2023 issue of “Safety Systems” journal