Industrial health and safety is an important yet largely unexplored application area of ubiquitous computing. In this paper we investigate the relationship between technology and organization in the context of a concrete industrial health and safety system. The system is designed to reduce the number of incidents of "vibration white finger" (VWF) at construction sites and uses wireless sensor nodes for monitoring workers' exposure to vibrations and testing of compliance with legal health and safety regulations. In particular we investigate the impact of this ubiquitous technology on the relationship between management and operatives, the formulation of health and safety rules and the risk perception and risk behavior of operatives. In addition, we contrast sensornetwork inspired and smart artifact inspired compliance systems, and make the case that these technology models have a strong influence on the linkage between technology and organization.
The NEMO project is exploring the use of mobile sensor nodes to augment physical work artefacts in order to ensure compliance with health and safety regulations. In this paper we present our experiences of designing and deploying the NEMO Hand Arm Vibration (HAV) monitoring system. Long term exposure to hand arm vibration can lead to serious health conditions and the NEMO HAV monitoring system offers an integrated architecture for capturing HAV exposure data in the field, providing feedback about exposure levels both in the field and as input to a back-end database. Our design allows health and safety regulations specified at the enterprise level to be embedded within the wireless sensor nodes allowing them to operate without any infrastructural support. The system has been the subject of a two week field trial that took place with the collaboration of a British construction and maintenance company. During the field trial, the NEMO HAV system was deployed to a road maintenance patching gang and data was collected on HAV exposure caused by hydraulic drills. The paper reports on the results of the field trial and the lessons learned through the real deployment of the system.
There is a growing global acknowledgement of the importance of computer science (CS) education. But traditional CS teaching tools and methodologies do not necessarily address the needs of a diverse, global student population or the latest developments in modern programming and data science. A recent growth area in CS education is physical computingcombining software and hardware to build interactive physical systems that sense and respond to the real world. This has been shown to result in broad engagement across a spectrum of users and has the potential to address shortcomings in established approaches. In this paper we provide an overview of physical computing in the classroom for those who are not familiar with the field. We start with a survey of prior research into which we have integrated our own experiences, and we summarize the benefits. We present an overview and taxonomy of popular physical computing devices and systems, and describe why many of these are fueling adoption. By way of example, we provide a detailed description of a modern physical computing system, the BBC micro:bit. We include several pointers for getting started in physical computing and hope that readers new to the area will be inspired to try it for themselves and to encourage others to do the same. We conclude by highlighting the opportunity to further extend the capability and reach of physical computing systems.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.