Project description

Human error is one of the main causes of serious accidents and is often accompanied by a sense of routine and a false sense of security, resulting in inadequate safety measures being taken, for example. However, many accidents can be avoided by wearing the right protective equipment, especially in industrial environments. 

The P3S2 project, which is being carried out under the leadership of the tactile vision working group, aims to investigate the addition of sensory, actuator and communicative capabilities to traditional personal protective equipment (PPE). This should increase the potential to further reduce the number of accidents and eliminate errors. The smart PPE provides the person wearing it with additional information and warnings about the current environmental conditions (temperature, air composition) and monitors the status of the equipment (intactness, completeness, closedness). In addition, it automatically connects to preventive, stationary protection systems as well as portable safety nodes on site and regulates access to technical equipment, among other things. For example, the opening of valves or access to hazardous areas is only permitted if the required PPE is complete and correctly fitted and the person has the necessary authorization. In our sub-project, it is important to do justice to the high degree of diversity of available communication systems. To this end, internal and external information must be effectively and efficiently aggregated, processed and passed on to the systems and employees in the right context. Technologies that are already established in the field of automated production should be used. Detected hazards are reported back intuitively and multimodally via audio-visual interfaces, drawing on the evolutionary advantage of vibrotactile feedback.