Today, ensuring work safety is considered to be one of the top priorities for various industries. Workplace injuries, illnesses, and deaths often entail substantial production and financial losses, governmental checks, series of dismissals, and loss of reputation. Wearable devices are one of the technologies that flourished with the fourth industrial revolution or Industry 4.0, allowing employers to monitor and maintain safety at workplaces. The purpose of this article is to systematize knowledge in the field of industrial wearables’ safety to assess the relevance of their use in enterprises as the technology maintaining occupational safety, to correlate the benefits and costs of their implementation, and, by identifying research gaps, to outline promising directions for future work in this area. We categorize industrial wearable functions into four classes (monitoring, supporting, training, and tracking) and provide a classification of the metrics collected by wearables to better understand the potential role of wearable technology in preserving workplace safety. Furthermore, we discuss key communication technologies and localization techniques utilized in wearable-based work safety solutions. Finally, we analyze the main challenges that need to be addressed to further enable and support the use of wearable devices for industrial work safety.
Nowadays, the flexible localization solution for various devices for work safety is one of the most demanding research questions. Notably, it is expected to provide an acceptable level of precision in different types of environments empowered by wearable technology and the Interent of Things (IoT) devices. Existing leading localization technologies are adapted for certain conditions, e.g., Wi-Fi, BLE, UWB are used for indoor areas and various GNSS-based ones for outdoor. This work focuses on investigating the LoRaWAN (868 MHz band) as a potential candidate to bridge this gap, being one of the most reliable and recognized communication technologies for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). In the past, the research community had a lot of critics with respect to the applicability of LoRaWAN for localization, while the vision is facing a tremendous change over the past two years. The purpose of this work is to assess the feasibility of LoRaWAN as a localization solution for work safety applications in the industrial scenario from different angles. The work is based on two measurement campaigns conducted at the
Nowadays, location-enabled mobile phones are becoming more and more widespread. Various players in the mobile business forecast that, in the future, a significant part of total wireless revenue will come from Location-Based Services (LBS). An LBS system extracts information about the user’s geographical location and provides services based on the positioning information. A successful LBS service should create value for the end-user, by satisfying some of the users’ needs or wants, and at the same time preserving the key factors of the mobile wireless device, such as low costs, low battery consumption, and small size. From many users’ perspectives, location services and mobile location capabilities are still rather poorly known and poorly understood. The aim of this research is to investigate users’ views on the LBS, their requirements in terms of mobile device characteristics, their concerns in terms of privacy and usability, and their opinion on LBS applications that might increase the social wellbeing in the future wireless world. Our research is based on two surveys performed among 105 students (average student age: 24 years) from two European technical universities. The survey questions were intended to solicit the youngsters’ views on present and future technological trends and on their perceived needs and wishes regarding Location-Based Services, with the aim of obtaining a better understanding of designer constraints when building a location receiver and generating new ideas related to potential future killer LBS applications
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