Compliant solutions for mobile and lone workers in potentially explosive ATEX environments.

All handsets and radios have a dedicated panic or SOS button that when pressed can generate an emergency alarm, alerting colleagues to the incident.  

In an emergency, lone workers can be found far more easily and faster if the response team know which room, floor or building the lone worker activated the alarm from. 

GPS doesn’t really work indoors and usually details a location from a last tracked position, normally outside the last building that was entered. To detail a more accurate position, additional technology is required such as Beacons or WiFi access points. 

When a user wanders passed an ‘Beacon’ or ‘WiFI access point’ their location details are updated on their handset. In the event of an incident, their last known location is included within the alarm message. 

If the Beacons and WiFi Access are correctly positioned it’s possible to narrow the search to a small area within a building i.e. a room or a floor of a building. The greater number of Beacons or WiFi access points the greater the location accuracy. 

All ATEX handsets are fitted with GPS technology and will transmit a GPS location within the alarm message. 

Check-in Timers are a good way to make sure lone workers are fit and well. A timer counts down and prior to reaching zero the user is notified to confirm their ‘OK’, which either extends or cancels the timer. 

Should the user fail to confirm their status, after repeated requests, an alarm is triggered. Check-in Timers are configurable; therefore, it could be set up for every 30 mins or once throughout the working day. 

In certain emergency situations, users don’t always have enough time to press their panic button to raise an alarm. This can happen when the lone worker is unexpectedly attacked, slips or falls, or become critically ill.

In these situations, the handset recognises that the user is rendered unconscious based on sensory technology and initiates an alarm automatically. The most widely adopted sensor is tilt, however, there are others including no-motion and fall detection.

Once the handset sensor is activated i.e. is tilted beyond a certain angle for a set period (usually 30 seconds) an alarm is triggered.  To prevent false alarms, a pre-alarm is usually activated to warn the user giving them time to cancel the automated alarm. 

Based on the user’s location it might be helpful to warn staff of additional risks posed by entering a high-risk area of the plant. 

This could be achieved by sending warning alerts either directly to the user’s handset or to staff within the vicinity. The message could be a reminder to check-in when entering a basement area or ATEX Zone that automatically activates the man-down sensor on their handset. 

Perhaps the user has entered a warehouse and an alert is triggered to warn forklift truck drivers to look out for other staff members.

In an emergency, speed of response is critical. Any delays informing the response team can have serious ramifications to the outcome, which is why our solution can deliver alarms directly to response team on their PC or mobile all within seconds of the incident taking place. 

Included in the alarm message are details of who triggered the alert, their telephone number, location and live audio streaming of the incident.

By configuring a virtual boundary around or within a specific location, it is possible to trigger an alert as and when a handset device either moves into or exits the Geo Fenced area.

As well as providing co-ordinates or details of a user’s location within an alarm message, it is far easier to interpret where they are if the information is displayed on a site map or street map.

To protect your premises and security team, check points using Beacons are set up around the building where security personnel need to monitor during their shift.  The security personnel handset will guide the user on a random route, going from one check point to another until the tour is complete. When one check point has been reached details of the next checkpoint is displayed on the security guard’s handset along with a designated time to reach it.  If the guard fails to reach the checkpoint in the designated time and doesn’t extend the time allowance, an alarm is triggered.   When specific areas are reached it is also possible to detail tasks the users must complete before reaching the next checkpoint. 

As well as managing lone worker alarms, it is also possible to adopt a similar process to manage other critical alarms triggered from systems such as building management, fire, SCADA, PLC, Effluent etc.

By integrating such systems to our critical alarm management platform (Automated Incident Manager), critical alarms such as ‘faulty pump’ could be distributed directly to a specific team, qualified to deal with the incident as well as operators within a control room. This can help save precious time as it means operators that are already dealing with other issues, don’t need to manually analyse the alarm, before taking on a what can be time consuming task of finding someone to manage the incident as this been done for them, automatically.

Furthermore, once a member of the response team accepts the critical alarm, the rest of the respond team including the control room operators are all updated.    

ANT’s Automated Incident Manager system can help teams to efficiently manage daily tasks generated throughout the day in a busy production facility.

Tasks can be easily added onto the secure messaging platform using a simple to use desktop application and distributed to the whole team or specific groups. 

To take on the task, a member of the team simply accepts the job, directly on their mobile handset, which automatically updates the group.

Once the task is complete it is ‘closed’ on the handset, which again informs the rest of the team.