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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.

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Automated systems have been seamlessly integrated into several industries as part of their industrial automation processes. Employing automated systems, such as autonomous vehicles, allows industries to increase productivity, benefit from a wide range of technologies and capabilities, and improve workplace safety. So far, most of the existing systems consider utilizing one type of autonomous vehicle. In this work, we propose a collaboration of different types of unmanned vehicles in maritime offshore scenarios. Providing high capacity, extended coverage, and better quality of services, autonomous collaborative systems can enable emerging maritime use cases, such as remote monitoring and navigation assistance. Motivated by these potential benefits, we propose the deployment of an Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) and an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) in an autonomous collaborative communication system. Specifically, we design high-speed, directional communication links between a terrestrial control station and the two unmanned vehicles. Using measurement and simulation results, we evaluate the performance of the designed links in different communication scenarios and we show the benefits of employing multiple autonomous vehicles in the proposed communication system.

Industrial digital transformation through efficient automation hinges largely on the deployment of communication infrastructures that meet the requirements of smart factory use cases. These infrastructures involve multiple devices that utilize different communication technologies to increase the overall operational efficiency. Rooting from the key implementation requirements of a smart factory environment, this article focuses on the role of cellular connectivity and wearable technology in enabling new industrial applications. Specifically, we shed light on a novel category of services -industrial mid-end wearable applications -by positioning their requirements among the 5G service classes. We then identify features that can complement cellular connectivity to further support the given requirements. More precisely, we review cellular network-aided device-to-device communications and reduced-capability devices. Our performance evaluation results justify the choice of these features and show that they can work in concert with cellular connectivity to enhance spectral efficiency and reliability in industrial mid-end wearable applications.

Carrier Aggregation (CA) was introduced by the 3GPP, in its Release 10 i.e., Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A), to address the peak data rate requirement set by the IMT-Advanced standard. As it enables for quick adoption of the fragmented radio spectrum, it was recognized by the telecommunication operators as a game-changing technology for achieving significantly increased data rates. In this paper, we detail how the implementation of CA with up to five Components Carriers (CCs) impacts the achievable throughput of connected end-users. In the simulation tool Network Simulator 3 (NS-3), the intra-band contiguous CA was implemented for both downlink and uplink channels. In addition, a uniform 2D grid of values that represent the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SINR) in the downlink with respect to the eNodeB (eNB) i.e., Radio Environment Map (REM) was implemented. As the previously published results for the CA contain mostly the data for the downlink channel, the implemented scenario provides new insights related to the uplink channel communication. Also, in the performance evaluation, we illustrate the expected data rates for the 5G New Radio (NR) systems and compare them with the achieved results in the case of 4G CA setup.

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