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Honeywell presents a conected sision of the future of Safety

August 2016 by Sean Clay President for Honeywell’s Safety and Productivity Solutions Division for Europe

Honeywell has a vision which it believes will bring a paradigm shift in the way companies approach health and safety in the future. One that will help them make better business decisions and drive competitive advantage. Here, Sean Clay, President for Honeywell’s Safety and Productivity Solutions Division for Europe, explains the rationale behind the company’s Connected Safety Solutions approach.

It’s not easy to describe a large, multi-faceted vision such as Honeywell’s connected safety solutions in one sentence, but essentially, it is a safety eco-system built around the worker which, as well as ensuring their safety, also provides and manages a great array of data for improved business management through sensor and internet-based technology.

Our new vision is a response to an ever changing market place, where operations around the world are becoming more complex and dangerous and more geographically dispersed. Conversely, it is also a response to the fact that companies are managing more data than ever before. Take for example, the next generation of offshore platforms that will not have a safety office or officer onboard but rather will have a manager, based in a central location and potentially thousands of miles away, who will oversee two or three such operations remotely.

In this evolving landscape, where business conditions can change from one moment to the next and when a single failure can have crippling consequences, companies are seeking the right information at the right time to make better business decisions to improve productivity and maintain competitive advantage. Plus, allied to the practical challenges, the media and the rise of social media have transformed safety incidents. Incidents that, in the past, might have remained under the radar of the general public now become global news stories in a very short time frame and therefore investment in prevention is rightly viewed as being a top priority now for brand reputation reasons as well as for practical productivity ones.

Data and sensors
So the question is how do businesses gain timely access to the information they need in order to operate more effectively? One of the major challenges is that currently, in the vast majority of organisations, all health and safety elements operate in isolation and the data is kept in silos. How can organisations integrate their myriad systems – PPE, software applications and databases – to create an accurate real-time picture? How can businesses integrate their data so that it can ‘anticipate’ and prevent equipment failures that could threaten safety and interrupt the profitable functioning of the business?

These are big, challenging questions which the safety industry has wrestled with for some time but we believe there is a solution, and that it lies in sensors. Whether they are on workers or on walls, it’s about integrating the data they provide to give real-time visibility into operations. With this people can know exactly what’s happening, at the second it is happening and make better decisions – be that sending the right emergency response team or correcting a small equipment problem or saving a worker’s life.

Honeywell began its life as a sensor company when it developed the thermostat and since that moment, more than a century ago, we have developed the business around critical sensing functionality. In the aerospace sector we produce a vast array of sensor technology for directional assistance (gyroscope) or ground or other aircraft proximity sensing. In our $2 billion security business we have technology surrounding access control and movement detection and in our process engineering business there is a range of flow meter and gas meter technology. By volume sales Honeywell is one of the major sensor companies in the world and it’s this technological muscle (for want of a better phrase) that the company is now bringing to bear on the safety industry.

Honeywell ’s connected vision is a good deal nearer to becoming a reality than one might assume. We have begun to lay the foundation for this vision and have some projects and systems, which go a long way down that path.

The ConneXt Safety Solution is a wireless gas detection system that combines portable gas detectors, location tracking and software to provide a real-time view of gas status throughout a facility. For example, plant managers in the oil and gas industry are using ConneXt Safety Solutions to immediately determine the location and severity of any gas alarm, get instant awareness of a ‘man down’, make better decisions about rescue and evacuation and proactively monitor the readings from any gas detector. Ultimately, ConneXt merges data from many detectors into a single map-based display for real-time hazard monitoring. And, it’s not just for toxic gas, the solution is also compatible with portable monitors for the weather, a workers’ vital signs, dust and other factors – all of which combine to form a real-time centre for managing safety risk.

In a world where safety is becoming more complex, companies need a dizzying array of documentation to keep track of training and accreditations, equipment service histories and asset registers, which contractors are on site and what permissions they have about where they can work and what they can do. Also, making this situation more complex and virtually impossible to manage effectively is the fact that all this information is stored in different places, on different platforms that are not linked or integrated.

Honeywell’s latest cloud-based technology uses the internet to create a centralised command centre for managing safety data. It connects multiple devices, systems and data sources — from the RFID tags on PPE to the information in human resources databases — to streamline data collection and give safety managers an integrated view of safety and compliance, all in one place that’s accessible from a web browser.

One global mining company, for example, was using ad-hoc, paper-based systems to manage workers’ safety training and access to hazardous areas, which took tremendous time and posed a significant risk to safety and compliance. Honewyell integrated its cloud-based technology with software from Honeywell Building Solutions to form a connected solution, ensuring that workers can only enter certain areas of the mine if they have the proper safety training and certification. Another part of this technology is unlocking intelligence on hazard exposure, so companies can make better decisions about worker safety and productivity — in the moment.

For example, is it safe for a worker to spend another hour in a high-noise environment? When integrated with Honeywell’s Quietpro system for hearing protection, displays minute-by-minute data about area sound levels and workers’ exposure. With this real-time visibility, safety managers will be able to determine exactly how long a worker can stay on task while remaining safe.

The connected vision also begins to generate some hugely exciting possibilities of where this might go in the future and the impact it could have on businesses and the wider safety world. For instance, hypothetically speaking, it could be that when first responders attend a potential HAZMAT incident, all the agencies begin to share data automatically (via Bluetooth) using one system. This would obviously save time and would ensure decisions are made using the latest real-time information. For firefighters and first responders, for example, Honeywell is developing wearable sensors that will connect to a self-contained breathing apparatus and send vital data about those workers — such as their oxygen level and location — to a remote centre for real-time monitoring.

Another key development is Honeywell’s safety card, a credit-card sized wearable gas detection and air quality monitoring system, which offers industrial workers an enhanced level of protection by monitoring for harmful pollutants. A cost-effective, flexible connected safety solution, the safety card has huge potential and could be applied in a diverse range of environments to protect people’s long-term health.

The most exciting aspect of our vision for connected safety solutions is how close it is to becoming a reality. It really does seem that the time to ‘get connected’ is upon us.


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