Real-time personal protective equipment monitoring system

The use of personal protective equipment (PPEs) in the construction industry is necessary to guarantee the safety of the workers. However, this equipment is not usually worn properly. Nowadays, the only control performed over the use of PPEs consists of a visual inspection. This paper introduces a novel cyber-physical system (CPS) to check in real time how the PPEs are worn by the workers. In order to perform such a control, an architecture composed of a wireless local area network and a body area network is considered. A system prototype was developed by using Zigbee and RFID technologies that support the deployment of both kinds of networks. The worker carries a microcontroller-based device that detects the presence of the PPEs and sends a report to a central unit where alerts and historical data are generated. This paper is basically aimed at introducing the monitoring system, describing its hardware and software components, and analyzing the coverage and consumption of the worker's device. (c) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.