A Wearable Platform to Identify Workers Unsafety Situations

IoT technologies allow the development of innovative solutions to monitoring human activities and, among others, ones connected to workers in order to improve their safety. However, this kind of solutions need to guarantee workers privacy preventing an usage aimed at people's control. Indeed, a similar employment is forbidden in several legislations and, more in general, solutions that have mechanisms that can hypothetical be used to monitoring the workers' activities, usually aren't accepted by workers. In this paper we illustrate the solution developed inside the SmartBench project based on wearable sensors to monitor the workers' status. Specifically, we describe in detail a waist mounted platform able to detect several situations ranging from standing, running, falling, laying down, etc. The platform is also equipped with environmental sensors able to monitor the presence of carbon monoxide, humidity, temperature, etc. Moreover, the platform can share data using an architecture-free communication schema, i.e. BLE protocol, with environmental sensors dispersed in the work area. On the base of such data, the system is able to detect anomalous situations and provide information about the status directly and exclusively to the worker. Only in case of an emergency the information is shared with the supervisor and other workers in order to better manage the crisis. Precisely, in this paper we illustrate the algorithms developed to identify the workers' status on the base of data extracted from the wearable sensor.