While many organizations have implemented some kind of safety monitoring system for their employees and staff (depending on risk assessment and employee roles), the vast majority of systems in use today are somewhat antiquated. These systems fail to leverage advances in technology in order to discover and respond to an incident pro-actively and as a by-product, waste time, waste money, and typically result in the accidental discovery that an incident has occurred. Automated safety monitoring is emerging as a new best practice; a process that uses person worn devices to convey a worker’s safety status in real time to others in order to provide instant and active safety awareness. The benefits of such a system are clear, reduced yearly expenses, reduced wasted time, improved emergency response times, reduced insurance costs, and improved outcomes for individuals through a prompt, location-based response.
Greater efficiencies are achieved in safety monitoring by automating the time intensive processes that have traditionally been performed as part of a monitoring plan. Functions such as phone-in check-ins and emergency phone calls are being replaced with instant, GPS enabled alerting, eliminating a significant amount of wasted time per day as well as reducing the lead-time between an emergency notification and an appropriate response. Safety alerts and check-ins can be delivered through instant notification via SMS text message and email to monitoring personnel, either within the organization or external to it. Additionally, a central monitoring station can be integrated into monitoring work-flows through direct server-to-server connections, centralizing monitoring responsibility with a 24/7 staffed facility.
Safety monitoring solutions automatically transmit a safety alert when an employee becomes incapacitated or otherwise unable to request help manually using the monitoring device. Such automation often comes in two forms: (1) fall detection that determines when an employee has fallen using accelerometers & gyroscopes and (2) man-down alerting that causes the device to automatically trigger an alarm when a total lack of motion is detected for a configurable period of time. Automation ensures that any injured employee will receive aid promptly through a pin-point response rather than waiting for an alarm to sound at the next missed check-in perhaps one or two hours later.
Automated safety monitoring is easy to implement, making it an ideal successor to current methods. Such safety monitoring systems are predominantly web-based, providing the greatest level of compatibility on computers and mobile devices and ensuring that critical information can be accessed from any location by any authorized personnel. These solutions are designed to facilitate rapid adoption by management and employees alike and include an option for central monitoring of emergency alerts to reduce the internal burden of monitoring upon current personnel.
Automated safety monitoring has applications in nearly every industry and organization that manages the safety of its personnel. These solutions establish a new best practice in delivering precise, prompt help to employees in distress. Between this and the time and cost-efficiency benefits, all organizations should examine if the move to an automated employee safety monitoring is of value to them.
Reblogged this on Blackline GPS Europe.
I think this would be safe, buy most people in a factory/industrial type facility don’t want it. Who want “the Man” to know your every move?
Hello deaun!
Thank you for posting! Here at Blackline GPS, we have experience working with organizations in which privacy is a concern for employees. An example of this would be any unionized work site where both the workers and the union itself may be concerned about management’s ability to oversee employee actions at greater depth. This is a valid concern and as such, we have found ways to address this problem. The two main methods are:
1) Full transparency of system use and purpose by the employer – An employer can come to an agreement with unions or its workforce in which the safety monitoring system is not to be used for any sort of punitive purpose. In this way, the workforce can have a say in what role the system will play and it what manner and employer can act on the information provided by the system.
2) Limited location tracking – Solutions such as Loner safety monitoring products are fully configurable to only provide the most recent location information when it is required during a safety alert (a potential emergency). In this situation a breadcrumb history is not stored withing a user account that could otherwise be used to document employee activities.
Additionally, the system can be easily set up to allow the union to audit the instances when location data was viewed by management.
I highly recommend that you check out the earlier article: Implementing GPS Enabled Safety Monitoring in a Unionized Workplace for more information on this topic! Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us if you have any questions, concerns, or thoughts!!
Reblogged this on EHS Safety News America and commented:
Good information if you have employees who work alone!
Reblogged this on and commented:
great article on the advancement of automated safety monitoring. Thanks for sharing.
Sounds like your product addresses a need faced by most manufacturing facilities. I’m interested in learning more about installation and cost.
Hello Tony,
Thanks for your comment! We’ll be in touch with you shortly to discuss facility-based employee safety monitoring.