The Wearables Revolution Meets Safety
The Wearables Revolution Meets Safety
The shrinking size of microprocessors, compact battery power, wireless communication and the Internet of Things (IoT) are leading to an explosive growth in wearable technology, making wearables more cost effective and accessible, both for consumers and businesses.
Just as the smartphone introduced us to the world of apps and how they can impact and help our lives, wearables have the potential to do the same thing. Because of the broad capabilities of sensors to measure and monitor, they have the potential to help prevent injuries and other exposures to loss.
Wearables for Workplace Safety
One promising area in the development of wearables is their emerging use to protect workers from injury. At manufacturing facilities and construction job sites, wearable technology has the potential to improve safety. In a situation where workers are in the vicinity of machinery, forklifts or heavy equipment, there may be heightened risk of injury. The use of wearables with proximity sensors can help mitigate this risk. These wearables are designed to monitor how close a worker is to the machinery and provide an alert to both the operator of the equipment and the worker when the worker is in a targeted zone. These alerts can help workers avoid an accident, an injury or worse.
Being struck by or colliding with an object is one of the most common causes of workplace accidents, according to Travelers claim data.1 It’s also one of the construction industry’s “Fatal Four” leading causes of death on the job site – 75 percent of which involve heavy equipment.2
“Many of these accidents are preventable,” said David Roy, 2nd Vice President, Forensics Laboratory, Travelers Risk Control. “Lives could be saved using proximity warning and alert technology.”
Learning from the Data
While providing another layer of protection against possible injury in the workplace, these devices can do more than potentially prevent accidents. Wearables can collect information, and have the potential to provide useful feedback from near misses…
Continue reading this Travelers blog post.
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