Safety has always been a major concern in industry. Without a safe environment, workers can’t be in the right mindset and productivity is reduced. Moreover, an unsafe work environment can be unsustainably expensive for companies, both in terms of lost productivity and compensation to workers.
It is therefore in the best interests of companies to ensure they do their best to guarantee the safety of not only employees but also other assets such as factory equipment.
However, safety is not easy to implement. It never has been. Multiple factors contribute to this. One of them is human nature. Humans are prone to making mistakes, to forgetting or ignoring safety regulations, and to being distracted by a range of things, including smartphones and fellow workers.
But if safety has been challenging before, it has become even more challenging of late. Technology is growing at an unprecedented pace. To remain relevant, and indeed to remain in business, companies have to keep adapting to new technologies.
Adapting to new technology, with the attendant costs in terms of investment and upgrading of skills, is a challenge on its own.
However, it makes safety even more complicated. Keeping track of all the safety regulations in a workplace that doesn’t change much can be a challenge in itself. But when this workplace is constantly evolving due to the regular adaptation of new technology, keeping up becomes quite the daunting task.
But there are ways to deal with these new safety challenges. They involve working with specialized industry 4.0 safety companies and adopting new approaches to safety.
What is Industry 4.0?
Industry 4.0 is the newest stage of human industrial revolution. We started with mechanization in the first stage, went through electricity and mass production in the second stage, and the adoption of the internet and automation in the third stage.
The fourth stage is about increased connectivity. Think about the internet of things. It’s also about automation at a deeper and more pervasive level. Think about all the new applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Industry 4.0 has seen the rise of self-driving cars and vehicle-to-everything communication. It has seen a deeply interconnected world where smart-watches, smart home appliances, smart vehicles, and smart mobile devices are all interconnected. It has seen the rise of edge technology, where the bulk of processing and decision making is taking place at edge devices. It has also seen the increased use of the cloud, with attendant benefits such as easier remote work and redundancy in service provision and data storage.
This automation and the rise of smart-devices is also taking root in industries. Smart, automated systems are being deployed more often. Such systems are working hand in hand with humans.
It is the constant adoption of new industry 4.0 technology in industries that is presenting a major challenge to safety. Thankfully, industry 4.0 safety companies have emerged with solutions that are up to the daunting task of workplace safety management in ever-changing workplace environments.
How the Connected Worker Platform Helps With Industry 4.0 Safety
A connected worker platform is crucial for the success of any industrial safety application for industry 4.0.
Industry safety 4.0 comes with many changes. Safety information for all these changes needs to be generated and delivered speedily and reliably to workers. Nothing helps do this more than a connected worker system. Safety information as well as hazard alerts can be delivered in real-time to on-site workers.
For an industrial safety application for industry 4.0 to work, data has to be reliably collected and analyzed. A connected worker system helps in the continuous collection of data. Through the use of artificial intelligence, this data can be analyzed to reveal areas where safety could be optimized.
In addition, the analysis of past accidents made possible by the collection of data can go a long way in avoiding future incidents.
