Working alone or remotely in an industrial setting is a common and oft-times risky business - especially where confined spaces are concerned. Add in dangerous materials, and the potential personal safety risk to the lone or remote worker increases exponentially.But how can employers keep lone workers as safe as possible? One such way is to use the newest technology, real-time monitoring.“Real-time monitoring goes beyond what anyone has used to in this industry,” explains Jason Fox, segment marketing manager, Portable Gas Detection, MSA, The Safety Company. “Instead of time-delayed text messages or email alerts, real-time monitoring offers in-the-moment, as-it-happens remote safety monitoring.”
Faster Reaction Time
And because real-time monitoring offers a totally connected system between worker, situation, and control room, regardless of how many workers and locations, it’s much easier to identify when and where a worker is having an issue. More importantly, it makes reaction time exponentially faster, making accidents, disasters, and even loss of life less of an overall threat.
Proponents of real-time monitoring, like Fox, say that although the technology is new, it’s already having a profound effect on lone worker safety. Before real-time monitoring, critical moments were lost between incident and response.
“Real-time monitoring provides the missing link in gas detection,” Fox explains. “Let’s say a worker walks into a tank, gets knocked to the ground, and their alarm is going off. They cannot necessarily save themselves, but real-time monitoring allows someone else to react in just seconds, which can literally mean the difference between life and death.”
A more global view
As a global leader in the development, manufacture, and supply of safety products, MSA believes real-time monitoring bridges a gap in the safety of the lone worker, and predicts that real-time monitoring systems will become the norm within a few short years.
“Gas detectors offer their own level of protection,” says Fox, “but real-time monitoring capabilities like the MSA ALTAIR® Grid go beyond that to ensure worker safety and greater peace of mind. ALTAIR Grid is a secure, web-based virtual control room that provides real-time incident management tools and seamless alert notification, including simultaneous location mapping for dozens of individual workers.”
Safety for rescuers, too
Prior to real-time monitoring, the lone worker could only hope that trouble could be detected early enough to back out of the situation. With real-time monitoring, rescue workers are safer, too, preventing would-be rescuers from entering a dangerous situation and being harmed themselves.
“The ability to respond rapidly in high-risk situations is everything,” says Fox. “We always say, ‘You can’t control the unexpected. But you can outsmart it.’ So we designed our real-time monitoring capabilities so that control centers, headquarters, and regional offices can see every worker’s location and safety status in real time, at a glance. It really provides a proactive worldview of worker safety, yet also gets very specific about what’s happening if an alert does occur.”
The MSA ALTAIR Grid gives users the ability to instantly assess and avoid high-risk situations. In combination with the MSA ALTAIR Connect app, and industry-leading ALTAIR 4XR and ALTAIR 5XR Multigas Detectors, ALTAIR Grid is a total management system for preventive and proactive defense over any worksite - whether the worksite is across the country or miles away.
ALTAIR Grid allows users to:
- Remotely monitor and interact with MSA gas detectors in real time
- Create, save, search, and update detailed incident history reports
- Manage device assignment and ALTAIR Grid access.
“At MSA, we took an innovative approach using wireless detection and cloud-hosted data storage to expand remote-monitoring capabilities and ensure worker safety,” says Fox. “With real-time monitoring, the safety of workers and the work site is always in view.”
