The construction industry is no stranger to occupational hazards, and employee safety is the top priority. When it comes to portable and handheld devices, many construction companies have bypassed modern handheld devices in many work areas to manage employee risk. While protected from electrocution, fire and explosion, however, employees and managers have been forced to live without the business benefits of connectivity.
Help is here in the form of intrinsically safe devices that meet Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) standards and can deliver a multitude of process improvements, making them reliable and beneficial assets in construction risk management.
The Need for Intrinsically Safe Devices
Risk looms large in construction. In 2017, slightly more than 20 percent of the 4,674 worker fatalities in the U.S. private industry were in the construction sector, according to OSHA.
OSHA also reports that effective control of hazardous electrical energy is one of the 10 most frequently violated standards in the industry. Electrocutions count as one of the “Fatal Four” factors for worker fatalities and is an important concern in construction risk management.
Given the high prevalence of unsafe and unpredictable electrical energy fields and conditions that might create danger, industry workers have traditionally worked with materials that are safe and won’t combust in such environments. These include paper blueprints and traditionally ruggedized, clunky computers. Most other equipment in construction falls under the Class I Div 2 category of products that meet OSHA specifications for construction risk management.
Compromised Productivity
Reliance on paper while on site constricts workers’ productivity in a variety of ways.
Intrinsically Safe Devices Keep Workers Connected
In today’s construction industry, agility and access to real-time data are key. Workers need access to critical information at the point of activity. The best way to deliver is to have devices that provide such capabilities, approved to operate in hazardous environments. Such intrinsically safe devices provide peace of mind and compliance with respect to safe working conditions, while delivering all the advantages of contemporary technology.
Pepperl+Fuchs’ intrinsically safe devices house the Samsung Galaxy Tab Active2 rugged tablet and can stand the rigors of operating in the hazardous construction industry. Through the Pepperl+Fuchs’ solution, workers gain access to electronic blueprints in real time and enable supervisors to elegantly assign tasks to multiple employees, seeing the jobs through to completion. The mobile devices allow workers to be untethered from clunky computers, travel light and ensure secure access to data through advanced biometric user authentication.
Mobile tablets also allow augmented reality layered solutions, which means smart assistance for tricky onsite problems is never more than a video call away. Through the tablet’s camera, remote experts can guide the construction worker through complicated procedures so operations are always done right, safely and on time.
Hazardous working conditions in the construction industry have had workers relying on safe but outdated tools of the trade. Intrinsically safe devices are the prescription that can deliver both process efficiencies and approved functionality in high-risk environments.