Automated PPE Misuse Identification and Assessment for Safety Performance Enhancement

The misuse (including nonuse) of personal protective equipment (PPE) directly catalyzes the changes from incidents to critical accidents and diseases. The main control over PPE use is visual inspections, which is time-consuming and its effectiveness depends largely on the observer's safety knowledge and experience, which often results in omissions or bias. To solve this problem, this study introduces a novel approach towards automated remote monitoring and assessing how the PPEs are worn. The real time location system (RTLS) and virtual construction are developed for worker's location tracking to decide whether the worker should wear helmet and give a warning, while the silicone single-point sensor is designed to show whether the PPE is used properly for further behavior assessment. The process of data synchronization and fusion of location coordinates and pressure data is described in detail and the system is tested in an open area experiment to prove its feasibility.