International. A team of researchers from the Universitat Politècnica de València has designed a new intelligent and low-cost system for monitoring and managing deployments of wireless sensor networks that has been used to improve the safety conditions of workers inside factories and industrial buildings.
His work has been published in the journal 'Computers in Industry', as reported by the academic institution in a statement. The system is based on the use of SWE (Sensor Web Enablement) technologies, until now used mainly in outdoor scenarios, but "only in industrial applications," said the entity. This technology allows monitoring "key" information on the safety of the work environment, from the operation of the machinery or the evolution of the manufacturing process, to various variables related to the health of the worker.
In this way, it can be used to assess risks and "thus avoid any possible accident in industrial environments". Each of the sensors in the system is connected to a control center with an SOS (Sensor Observation Service) server on which all recorded data is received and stored. From them, the system can make decisions in real time to "ensure maximum safety of workers, such as stopping a machine or sending an alert to a specific operator."
"In a factory, we can have different sensors distributed to monitor health or to manage machinery or manufacturing. With our system, these sensors send the information to the SOS, which acts as an evaluation and decision-support center for security management," explained Carlos Palau, researcher at the Distributed Real-Time Systems and Applications Group and professor at the ETSI of Telecommunications at the UPV.
