As one of the leading rugged computer providers, Getac offers extensive rugged computing product lines and serves a wide range of vertical markets.
Millions of workplace accidents happen each year, many of which are within the power of employers to prevent. According to Getac’s research, while overall worker safety has improved over the last decade, some industries seem to have plateaued or even reverted in recent years.
According to the research, the situations considered most hazardous by the surveyed environment, health, and safety (EHS) professionals are what you might expect. This includes working at heights, with electricity, or operating machinery. However, these factors alone often don’t cause accidents. Secondary hazards tend to factor in. Common factors listed include human error or fatigue, neglect of safety procedures, and inadequate training.
EHS professionals see three technologies with the most potential for addressing these secondary hazards – AR/VR, AI, big data, and wearables. All three of these technologies either require or can be made more effective or cost-effective by being coupled with a rugged tablet for the near future.
Augmented reality (AR) need not require a head-mounted device (HMD). It can be done via an overlay on a tablet screen at less cost. If you do use an HMD for either augmented or virtual reality (VR), having at least some of the computing work done in a rugged tablet instead of the HMD, or some other piece of specialized wearable tech, is likely to be more cost-effective. It is less likely to inspire apprehension in those facing the prospect of having a computer on their head or their body.
Advanced robotics enabled by artificial intelligence (AI) and big data has tremendous potential to improve worker safety. However, the move from Industry 4.0 to Industry 5.0 will see the widespread deployment of collaborative robots (cobots). These are more functionally flexible than the typical industrial automatons in use today. A rugged tablet will prove an effective way to work with them.
Wearables can monitor a worker’s health and vital signs, including signs of fatigue or waning attention. However, if a worker is in a remote location, a wearable might not have the long-range transmission capabilities needed to stay connected. Such capabilities would drain a wearable-sized battery, as would the broadband capabilities required to enhance its functionality and security with edge computing.
However, many industries that might use such workers’ safety technologies, coupled with rugged tablets, might also require these technologies to be intrinsically safe.
Intrinsic safety is a protection technique applied to electrical and wiring products. This is to ensure safe operation in hazardous areas by limiting the energy available for ignition. Intrinsic safety may include electrostatic discharges, hot surfaces, heat, friction, or spark. A product rated as “intrinsically safe” is designed and certified to be incapable of producing heat or spark sufficient to ignite an explosive atmosphere.
When a Getac tablet is rated as intrinsically safe, it is rated to ATEX/IECEx standards (depending on the geographic region) for intrinsic safety in Zone 2/22 conditions under regular operation. Zone 2 means the atmosphere is not typically explosive, but there is a risk if fumes (normally petrochemical fumes) escape. In Zone 22, the atmosphere is also not ordinarily explosive. However, there is potential if an excess of powder or dust enters the atmosphere due to some problem.
With the digital transformation of industries that operate with such hazards increasingly taking on a mobile component, the need for intrinsically safe technologies is growing. But beyond the transformation drive, sectors that use intrinsically-safe tablets, such as oil & gas, mining, and certain utilities, face other pressures beyond worker safety driving adoption.
During the pandemic, the doing of specific tasks by pairs or teams has become problematic. It is becoming increasingly necessary to do these tasks alone, at least physically. But with a ruggedized tablet, a solo worker can receive spoken or visual instructions from HQ or even AR overlay. And as an added benefit, that expert at HQ can lend their expertise to many more tasks this way than they ever could in the field.
One type of remote guidance that warrants special attention is isolated inspection. Facilities such as mines and oil rigs must be periodically inspected for safety. They can be challenging to examine under normal circumstances if they are in remote locations. But the pandemic has made things harder, and there are no guarantees as to when it will end. But remote guided inspection, where a worker onsite carries around a tablet with a camera, remotely piloted by an offsite inspector, has filled this gap in many instances.
Many hazardous industries will see a large portion of their workforce retire over the next few years. And employers don’t want to train their replacements in classrooms. They want to train them in the field, in context, using remote guidance or video instruction. It is best to use an intrinsically safe device with long battery life. A bright screen in the device is essential to view and read under any circumstance. This is more so if you’re a new employee heavily dependent on your tablet for instruction, guidance, and reference.
Intrinsic safety relates to explosion risk, but there are other features you’ll want in an intrinsically-safe tablet. This is because you may be using it for many different things over a long work shift.
Intrinsically-safe Wi-Fi access points are costly. Hazardous areas like oil refineries might have more ground to cover than is ideal for a Wi-Fi network. Another dangerous industry where Wi-Fi can be problematic is mining, with its irregular, obstructive, shape-changing landscape. Private mobile networks can offer the range and comparable network capacity you need for mobile video streaming and augmented reality overlay for both industries and many others.
In an area where sparks are a concern, you can’t just plug your device into a local wall socket when it runs low on power. It would be best if you had long battery life, preferably with the ability to swap out a drained battery, without a tool, without operational interruption (i.e., hot-swapping), so you can stay in the field until the job is done.
There may be very little shade if you’re in an open-pit mine, an oil field, or at a remote utility site. So, if you are receiving AR overlay instructions on your tablet’s screen, direct sunlight can make them impossible to see if the screen is dim. It is recommended to have at least 800 nits of brightness to guarantee viewability out in the open on a bright sunny day. In doing so, this creates an even greater need for that long battery life mentioned earlier.
Getac offers various intrinsically-safe tablets in different screen sizes, purpose-built and customizable for multiple industries and use cases. All are easily identifiable by the suffix “EX” (as in ATEX/IECEx) attached to their model names (F110-EX). Getac tablets are fully-rugged devices built to withstand impact, extreme temperatures, water, dust, vibration, and many other forms of stress. They are built to the usual Getac standards and are available in a diverse variety of sizes and use cases.
Getac offers a pair of highly-mobile intrinsically-safe models in either the Android (the 7” ZX70-EX) or Windows (the 8” T800-EX) operating systems. Getac optimized these devices for portability and one-handed use. This makes them well-suited to being your all-day mobile communications companion.
Getac built the UX10-EX with Windows for those who need a little bit of everything. Its 10” screen is large enough for comfortable media viewing and multitasking. This is ideal especially when you attach its optional keyboard and/or office dock. It is not so large as to sacrifice the mobility you want in a device you may be carrying all day.
Getac's 11” and 12.5” models (F110-EX and K120-EX) are our workhorse models. These products offer screens sufficiently large for group presentation (made better with an optional kickstand), in-motion vehicular use (via optional mount), and a comfortable all-day typing experience (via optional attachable keyboard) if necessary. To learn more about intrinsic safety (ATEX/IECEx), click here.
As one of the leading rugged computer providers, Getac offers extensive rugged computing product lines and serves a wide range of vertical markets.
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