You can already read the article Podéis leer el artículo “A smart monitoring system reduces the occupational accidents and improves the efficiency in the construction” published in the platform enerTIC website available in Spanish in this link and we copy the entire article below. This article was written by Lourdes Martínez, D Communication and Marketing at amplía))) for this Energy Efficiency Platform.
We are being participated in mentality change that the construction is living due to the need to minimise the occupational accidents and monitor all the assets. The main goal is to avoid the operators accidents because of being in risks or danger areas. In addition, having a comprehensive control of all assets in real time to reduce the costs and improve the efficiency of the staff and the machinery.
The construction is a quite conservative sector in order to introduce new disruptive technologies like the Internet of things and, where we have taught and given some courses about the applications and the benefits of this technology for this market.
In this doctrine process, we realized some of the issues of these companies were knowledge not very precise in the localization of construction elements as the period of machinery use and the work done for the operators.
For solving these problems, we developed a smart monitoring system to control, extract and analyse data from each construction element. We can know it localization, if it switches on or turns off, do updates of the firmware, provide complete and identified inventory, operate remotely and create alarms thanks to sensors associated with each device.
All the operators are provided with a device that is incorporated into their work equipment and they collect data about their location and their height to minimise the occupational work and guarantee their health. We can know the exact number of operators in risk areas or specific locations through the monitoring of all the staff, verifying that only qualified operators are working in these specific areas and they feel good. If an operator who is not an authorised person to be in this area, enters here, he will receive immediately an automatic alarm in his device to abandon it.
Among the benefits obtained by the construction company with this monitoring solution, we can highlight the exhaustive monitoring of what happens on the construction project in real time, the machinery that is on the field and whether it is working or is stopped for a day. With this, we minimise the location times of the material and machinery and we reduce the contracted machinery costs to third parties by knowing its remote use. In turn, optimizing project planning makes it easy to deliver the project on the agreed date.
In addition, the company claims an improvement in internal communication with its departments thanks to this intelligent system. A system that offers data transparency about its performance of each department and user to obtain reports with the essential information for them. Each user can customise the interface as they want to visualise and identify the processes, the machinery, the material and the operators.
Other of the system achievements is the reduction of gas emissions, electricity and carbon footprint in the project to go through more sustainable construction. All of them are part of the commitments with the environment and the society of this construction company.
This project started with a pilot managing around 100 devices in two locations in the UK and Norway. Once the construction company detected the system was sure, reliable and scalable to thousands and thousands of devices, they continued adding new devices on the field, more than 4000 devices. Currently, this system is deployed in two important projects in the Arabian countries where the occupational health of the operators is being monitored, their location to reduce the entrance of unauthorised personnel in warning areas.
Lourdes Martínez
Marketing and Communication Director at amplía)))
