How Does Beacon Technology Make Workplaces Safe?

Beacon devices and BLE technology are being implied to develop various solutions across the world due to a range of advantages. To support this sentence, ABI research has predicted that the overall BLE beacon market will break 500 million units by the end of 2021.

Why Innovation for Workplace Safety is Important?

Employees are the lungs of any company, big or small. Ensuring the maintenance of good health and safety measures for all employees has been a great challenge for any organization. Take coal mines, diamond mines, and several petroleum jobs into consideration. There are thousands of workers working in the most hazardous conditions on this planet. Their everyday life at work comes with twists and turns. That needs advanced precautionary measures and proactive solutions.

Fortune 100 companies and many other global enterprises have come forward and led the line to solve this gruesome problem. There are companies that have developed and implemented smart solutions leveraging BLE/Beacons technology at workplaces to ensure all-time health and safety on the work floor and even on-site safety for remote workers.

Before Going to the solutions, let us take a brief detour to understand what’s all the fuss about these beacon devices!!

What is a Beacon Device?

Beacon, a low energy-consuming device, contains a low-frequency chip that sends and receives the signals. It then acts accordingly and displays programmed content on the devices that are in the range of beacons. It uses Bluetooth 4.0 BLE technology and has a searching range of up to 50 m. Beacons come in various shapes and sizes and can be customized too. Coin-sized Beacon can be easily placed indoors, and users can readily detect its UUID signal, RSSI signal, and battery life signal with smartphones.

The main objective of using beacon technology is to revolutionize customers’ experience by bringing an all-new dimension of interaction and communication.

How do Beacons work?

Beacons act as an indoor or outdoor positioning and transmitting system. It acts as a system where the relevant information is stored and triggers the transmitters to shoot the information to nearby or in-range beacon-enabled and compatible devices, usually smartphones. Beacon devices work well in the absence of Wi-Fi and Internet as Beacon-ready devices notify the users about any product from some distance even if there is no network inside the premises.

BLE/Beacons Solutions Ensuring Workplace Safety

1) Wearables For Remote Workers in Hazardous Locations

Embraced with wearable technology, beacons can be mounted with other IoT sensors on a wearable. The overall solution can be customized and designed to make it work in the cases of emergencies where communication is harder, for example, workers working in tunnels, mines, etc.

Sensors and other industrial hardware can be used to detect fire, gas leakage, or flood. If any of these happens, the system generates and pushes the alert messages to the control room operator. Beacon takes over the communication channel in such areas where online connectivity could be an issue.

It provides supplemental data where GPS signals are not present and communicates its location data through BLE technology to GPS Locator watch. Or it could be any other wearable device. So it can be used as the indoor safety purpose regarding location awareness and delivering an ideal beacon-based solution for those who have to work alone. The solution also helps in identifying fall alerts in case an employee falls at various locations and seeking help.

2) Beacons For Safeguarding In-house Employees

Beacons can play an essential role in ensuring workplace safety, specifically for industries like construction, logistics, and transportation. With Beacons’ small size and power efficiency, they can be mounted on any electronic hardware and delivers a perfect IoT solution for real-time tracking of employees, assets, etc. It also helps in monitoring the indoor environment through various sensors and their data.

This gives the staff complete peace of mind as they work. The data can be analyzed that helps to avoid any future mishaps, installs proactiveness, and awareness for periodic maintenance of the indoor tools.

3) Why Beacons are Better than Location Tracking Technologies Indoors?

There are constraints about the precision using standard geofencing technology. Beacons are known to solve that problem by improving location accuracy. BLE/Beacon devices are more precise in terms of determining the locations with a more narrow range than GPS, Cell tower triangulation, and Wi-Fi proximity, especially for indoor locations.

Beacons can be positioned and placed to transmit useful information in the vicinity. The range can be increased as per the requirement with the installation of more beacon devices. Once installed, the beacon devices could work for months or years, that’s good its battery consumption is.

4) Beacon-Based Solution for Employee/Asset Tracking

The tiny size but very wise nature of beacon devices is bliss for building asset-tracking solutions. Conventionally, RFID technology was used for this purpose that required a scan. We all, by now, would have experienced the application of RFID.

Well, ‘Say No’  to the scanning with the use of BLE/beacon devices. Yes, beacons can identify an employee without the scanning process using RFID tags. For example, a worker in a particular area quickly can be identified without scanning his badge. This can be very helpful at mustering points in the event of an emergency.

As per EHS Today magazine, current PPE manufacturers are already using beacons in their products to make Smart PPEs. These PPEs not only track but also manages the safety and security of the workforce.

5) Proactive & Advanced Warnings About Machine Failures

Beacons help to collect precise, continuous, and useful data for analysis. They are super easy to be mounted on a static location or moving platforms such as forklifts and heavy machinery in motion. Beacons can be implemented and used to send alerts or warnings in case of any inconsistency in the movement of a machine that could lead to a disaster. The overall idea is to warn the workers when something is about to happen with such moving hazards.

Final Takeaway

Along with transportation, construction, and manufacturing; industries like medical, education, banking, etc. can also use it as an effective transmission tool as well as in assuring indoor health and safety measures.

Why Choose IndiaNIC for Customized Beacon App Development?

IndiaNIC has been the top iBeacon applications development company, delivering software products globally since 1997. A team of IoT engineers and mobile app developers at IndiaNIC will help you integrate iBeacon SDK into your existing or new system.

Our experts will help you build a web-based admin from where you can create, edit, or manage the content you wish to broadcast through iBeacons. It will also help you in managing and sending push notifications as well as various analytics (behavioral, operational, etc.) for optimum management of health and safety.

Get in touch with our team if you wish to discuss a similar project idea.