Electrical
Wearable safety technology and sensors field guide for crews
Safety wearables put a sensor on the worker to catch the gas, the fall, the heat, and the lone-worker emergency and call for help fast, but they speed the rescue, they do not replace the controls.
Direct answer
A safety wearable is a sensor worn on the body that detects a hazard such as gas, a fall, heat strain, or a lone-worker emergency and alarms for help with the worker's location. It speeds the rescue, it does not prevent the hazard, so the real controls come first and OSHA and the manufacturer govern.
Key takeaways
- A safety wearable detects a hazard and alarms for help, speeding the rescue; it does not prevent the hazard, so controls come first.
- The standard gas wearable is a personal 4-gas monitor reading oxygen (O2), combustible gas at the LEL, carbon monoxide (CO), and hydrogen sulfide (H2S).
- Bump-test gas monitors before each use to confirm alarms trip, and calibrate on the manufacturer's interval, often monthly or quarterly; pull any unit that fails.
- Set alarm set points to OSHA limits and the gases actually present, not out-of-box defaults; heat acclimatization takes 7 to 14 days.
- Start with the single highest-risk hazard and pilot before scaling; confirm the response, worker buy-in, and connectivity before buying the device.
What a safety wearable is, and what it actually does
A safety wearable is a sensor worn on the worker that watches for a hazard and calls for help fast. The hazards it catches are the ones that hurt and kill people on a jobsite: gas you cannot see or smell, a fall, heat building inside the body, and the lone-worker emergency where someone goes down with nobody around to notice. The device senses the condition, sounds an alarm on the worker, and on the connected versions sends an alert with a location to someone who can act.
Here is the honest framing, and it sets up everything else in this guide. A wearable detects and alerts. It does not prevent the hazard. The gas is still in the manhole whether or not the worker is wearing a monitor. The fall still happens. What the wearable changes is the time between the emergency and the rescue, and it adds a record of what the worker was exposed to. That is real value, and it is also a narrow claim. Treat it as more than that and you have talked yourself into skipping the controls that keep people alive.
The work is three decisions. Pick the wearable for the hazard most likely to hurt your crew, not for the one with the best demo. Wire it to a response that moves when the alarm goes off. And get the worker to wear it, every shift, which is a comfort and trust problem more than a technology one. The rest of this guide is those three decisions in detail, with the gas, fall, heat, and lone-worker cases worked out. For the spaces where gas is the killer, this pairs with our confined-space entry guide. For the worker-versus-equipment hazard it pairs with our proximity and struck-by guide.
Do safety wearables prevent accidents?
No. A safety wearable does not prevent an accident. It detects the hazard and alerts for help, which shortens the time to rescue and gives you a data layer, and that is the whole of what it does. This is the single most misunderstood point about the technology, and getting it wrong is how a crew ends up worse protected than before the devices showed up.
Think through a gas event. The worker wearing a connected 4-gas monitor still walks into the same bad air. The monitor does not clean the atmosphere. What it does is alarm sooner and louder than the worker's own senses, which often give no warning at all, and send the location to a team that can pull the worker out. The rescue is faster. The exposure still happened.
So the wearable is a backup and a faster alarm, never a substitute for the control. Ventilation removes the gas. Fall protection arrests the fall. A work-rest cycle keeps the body from overheating. The wearable sits behind all of those and catches what they miss. OSHA frames jobsite safety around the hierarchy of controls and around the specific hazard standards, and a detection device lives near the bottom of that hierarchy. Sell it to a crew as prevention and you have quietly given them permission to lean on the weakest layer.
The controls come first, the wearable is the last layer
The hierarchy of controls is the order safety professionals rank protections, strongest first: eliminate the hazard, substitute something safer, engineer it out, use administrative controls and work practices, then personal protective equipment. A wearable is a detection and alarm layer that sits at or below the PPE level. It is the last and fastest alarm, not the first defense.
That order is not academic. It tells you where to spend money and attention first. If a confined space has a gas hazard, the control is to test and ventilate the air and, where possible, remove the reason to enter at all. The 4-gas monitor on the worker is the backstop for when ventilation fails or the air shifts. Reverse the order, buy the monitors and skip the ventilation, and you have spent on the weak layer while leaving the strong one undone.
Read the wearable as insurance on the controls, not as the controls. When the engineering and the work practice are in place, the wearable catches the gap between what you planned and what the day actually does. When they are not in place, the wearable is an alarm screaming over a hazard nobody removed, and an alarm with no control behind it buys very little.
What are the categories of safety wearables?
Safety wearables sort by the hazard they watch, and each category is a different sensor, a different alarm, and a different response. The read across all of them is the same: each detects and speeds the response, none removes the hazard, and each leans on a control sitting in front of it. Pick by the hazard most likely to hurt your crew, and confirm the specifics against OSHA and the device manufacturer.
| Category | What it senses | What it speeds | The control in front of it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gas detection | O2, LEL, CO, H2S and other gases | Evacuation and rescue from bad air | Air testing and ventilation |
| Fall and man-down | A fall or a no-motion event | Rescue of an unwitnessed fall | Fall protection and guarding |
| Heat stress | Heart rate, core-temperature strain | A break before heat illness | Work-rest cycle and acclimatization |
| Fatigue | Drowsiness in an operator | An alert before a microsleep | Shift limits and scheduling |
| Proximity | A worker near moving equipment | An operator and worker warning | Separation and a traffic plan |
| Location | Where the worker is | Finding a down worker, mustering | The response and rescue plan |
| Exoskeleton | Nothing; it supports the body | Reduced strain over a shift | Lifting practice, material handling |
Gas detection: the personal 4-gas monitor
Gas detection is the most established and the most life-critical of the safety wearables, because the hazard it watches kills with no warning. The standard tool is the personal multi-gas monitor, usually a 4-gas unit that reads oxygen (O2), the lower explosive limit for combustible gas (LEL), carbon monoxide (CO), and hydrogen sulfide (H2S). Those four cover the common confined-space and industrial killers: an atmosphere that is oxygen-deficient, explosive, or poisonous, often all of it looking and smelling like nothing.
The connected version is where the wearable earns its keep over a plain detector. When the gas alarm trips, a standalone monitor warns the one worker wearing it. A connected monitor also pushes the alarm, the gas reading, and the worker's location to a monitoring team or a supervisor, so help moves before the worker can even radio. In a confined space, where a worker can be unconscious in a breath or two, that head start is the difference that matters.
Hedge hard on the numbers. The alarm set points, the low and high alarms and the time-weighted average and short-term exposure limits, are configured to OSHA permissible exposure limits and the manufacturer's defaults, and they must match your site and the gases present. Do not freelance them. This is also exactly the gas hazard our confined-space entry guide covers in full, including the air testing and ventilation that have to come before anyone wearing a monitor breaks the plane of the opening. The monitor is the backstop. The testing and the ventilation are the control.
What is a bump test, and how is it different from calibration?
A bump test is a quick check, run before each use, that exposes the gas detector to a known gas to prove the sensors respond and the alarms actually trip. It is not the same as calibration. The bump test answers one question: if there were gas right now, would this device alarm? Calibration is the deeper adjustment that corrects the sensor reading against a certified reference gas, on a schedule, to fix the drift every electrochemical sensor develops over time.
This is the number-one discipline in gas detection, and it is the one most often skipped because the device looks fine. A 4-gas monitor that powers on, shows a clean screen, and reads 20.9 percent oxygen can still have a dead sensor that will not alarm when it counts. The bump test is how you find that out in 60 to 90 seconds, before the worker is in the hole, instead of after.
Follow the manufacturer and the recognized guidance, not habit. Industry guidance, including the International Safety Equipment Association and the device maker's manual, points to verifying the alarm before each day's use and a full calibration on the manufacturer's interval, often monthly or quarterly, and immediately after any failed bump test or any drop or shock. A detector that does not alarm is worse than no detector, because the worker trusts it. Bump it, log it, and pull any unit that fails.
Fall detection and man-down for the unwitnessed fall
Fall detection and man-down alarms cover the worker who goes down with nobody watching. The wearable uses an accelerometer to sense the signature of a fall, or a no-motion condition where the worker has not moved for a set period, and it auto-alerts with a location so a rescue can start without the worker doing anything. That last part is the point: the worst falls are the ones that knock a worker out, and an unconscious worker cannot press a button.
The case it fits best is the unwitnessed fall, especially the lone worker on a roof, in a vault, up a ladder, or anywhere out of sight of the crew. A standard fall-arrest system catches the worker on the rope. It does nothing to summon help if the worker is left hanging and hurt, and suspension trauma turns minutes into a medical emergency. The man-down alarm is what closes that gap by calling for the rescue.
Tune the sensitivity to the work. A device set too touchy reads a hard sit-down or a dropped tool belt as a fall, and the over-alerting trains the response to ignore it. Set it against the manufacturer's guidance for the activity, and treat fall protection itself as the control that comes first. The wearable speeds the rescue after the fall. The harness and the guarding are what keep the fall from happening.
The lone-worker system
A lone-worker system is the package built for the person who works alone, out of sight and earshot of anyone who would notice trouble. It combines a few of the other functions: scheduled check-ins the worker has to answer, no-motion and man-down detection, a panic or SOS button the worker can press, and a location so help knows where to go. Miss a check-in or trigger an alarm and the system escalates to a monitor or a supervisor.
The problem it addresses is real and old. A worker alone has no one to see the fall, smell the gas, or call it in, so the time between the emergency and anyone noticing can stretch from minutes to the end of a shift. Many employers carry a duty to account for employees who work alone, and OSHA reaches lone work through the general duty to provide a safe workplace and through the specific standards that apply to the task, such as confined space or fall protection.
The system is only as good as what happens when it fires. A panic button that rings a phone nobody is watching is theater. The check-in and the alarm have to land on a person or a monitoring service that will act, with a procedure for what to do and how to reach the worker's location. Build the response first, then the device.
Heat-stress wearables and the work-rest cycle
Heat-stress wearables watch the body for the warning signs of heat illness before the worker recognizes them. The common sensors read heart rate and estimate core-temperature strain from heart rate, skin temperature, and motion, and some pair that with the surrounding heat to flag when a worker is heading for trouble. The device prompts a break, and on connected systems it alerts a supervisor and logs the cooling period.
Heat illness is a fast-moving emergency and a leading cause of weather-related worker death, which is why OSHA has pushed hard on it, with a national emphasis program and a proposed heat standard built around work-rest cycles, water, shade, and acclimatization. Acclimatization is the one people underrate. A body adapts to heat over 7 to 14 days of gradually increasing exposure, and the new or returning worker who skips that ramp is the one most likely to go down. The wearable can catch the individual who is overheating faster than a crew-wide schedule can.
The framing holds here too. The wearable does not cool the worker. The work-rest cycle, the water, the shade, and the acclimatization plan are the controls that prevent the heat illness. The American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists sets core-temperature limits the programs are built around. The wearable is the early warning that the plan is not keeping up with the day, so you intervene before the ambulance.
Fatigue and drowsiness detection
Fatigue and drowsiness wearables target the operator whose attention is fading, usually on a long shift behind heavy equipment or a vehicle. They watch for the signs of a microsleep or declining alertness, through eye and head tracking on a camera-based unit or through movement and physiology on a worn device, and they alert the operator before the lapse becomes a crash or a struck-by event.
The hazard is the drowsy operator, and it scales with shift length, night work, and the monotony of a long haul or a repetitive cycle. A second of inattention behind a loaded machine is enough. The alert is meant to break that second before it ends badly.
The control in front of it is scheduling: shift limits, rotation, and breaks that respect how long a person can actually stay sharp. A fatigue monitor that buzzes a worker awake on hour 14 is treating a symptom the schedule created. Use the alerts as a signal to fix the roster, not as a license to run people past the point where they are safe.
Proximity tags: the wearable side of struck-by
Proximity wearables are the worker's side of the struck-by problem. The worker carries a tag, and the equipment senses the tag when the two get too close, warning the operator and the worker and, on some systems, slowing or stopping the machine. It is the wearable piece of a larger detection setup that also uses cameras and radar on the equipment.
Struck-by is one of the construction hazards OSHA ties to the most deaths, and most struck-by fatalities involve heavy equipment, usually a worker on foot in a spot the operator cannot see while the machine backs or turns. The tag is meant to flag that worker before contact.
The same rule applies as everywhere else: the tag is the last layer, and separating people from equipment with a traffic plan, a spotter, and high-visibility clothing is the control that comes first. We cover the equipment side, the detection zones, and the alarm-fatigue problem in full in our proximity warning and struck-by guide. The wearable tag is one input to that system, not the whole answer.
Location: finding the down worker fast
Location is the function that turns an alarm into a rescue. When a worker goes down, the alarm tells you something is wrong and the location tells you where, which on a large site or in a tower is the difference between a fast rescue and a search. Most connected safety wearables carry GPS outdoors and some form of indoor positioning, and they push the location along with the alarm.
Location also does the routine work of mustering and evacuation. In an emergency you need to know who is on site and who is accounted for, and a location layer answers that faster than a paper roll call at the gate. For a down worker, it points the rescue straight at them instead of room by room.
This is also where the privacy tension is sharpest, and it is worth naming up front. Continuous location tracking feels like surveillance to the people wearing it, and that perception decides whether they wear it. The way through is to scope the tracking to safety, the alarm and the rescue, and to be plain about it, which the privacy section covers. The rescue speed is the reason the function exists. Keep it pointed at that.
The exoskeleton: the ergonomic wearable
An exoskeleton is the odd one in this set, because it does not detect or alarm anything. It is an ergonomic wearable, a powered or passive frame that supports the back, shoulders, or arms and offloads some of the strain from lifting, carrying, and working overhead. The goal is preventing the musculoskeletal disorder, the slow injury that builds over years of repetitive load rather than the sudden emergency the other wearables catch.
Musculoskeletal disorders, low-back pain most of all, are among the most common and expensive injuries in the trades, and they come from manual handling repeated over a career. Studies of back-support exoskeletons in construction show reduced muscle activity and lower metabolic cost on bending and lifting tasks, with workers reporting less fatigue, though the field is still young and the results vary by device and task. Passive units lower the back-strength demand of a task; powered units add active assistance.
So the exoskeleton is the rare safety wearable that does sit closer to prevention, because it reduces the load that causes the injury rather than alarming after the fact. It still does not replace good lifting practice, mechanical handling, or designing the heavy lift out of the work. Treat it as one tool against musculoskeletal injury, weighed against the strain it can shift to other joints, and trialed before you commit a crew to it.
The response: a wearable is worthless without it
A safety wearable is worth nothing without a response. This is the point that gets lost in the procurement: the device is the cheap, easy part, and the response is the hard, expensive part that saves the worker. An alarm that fires into the void, a buzz nobody hears, a location nobody acts on, changes no outcome at all.
The response is a chain, and every link has to hold. The alarm has to reach a person or a monitoring service that is actually watching. That person has to know what to do, a written procedure, not improvisation. They have to be able to reach the worker's location, which means the location has to come through with the alarm. And there has to be a rescue plan matched to the hazard, because for a confined-space gas event or a worker hanging in a harness, calling 911 and waiting is not a plan.
Decide who acts before you buy the device. A monitored service watches around the clock and dispatches. An internal call tree puts named people on the hook, which works only if they answer and know their role. Either way, test it. Trip a real alarm and time how long until someone moves. The number you get is your true protection, and it is usually slower than anyone assumed. The device speeds the rescue only as far as the response behind it allows.
Connectivity, dead zones, and battery
Connectivity is the path from the wearable to the network to the response, and it is where a lot of these systems quietly fail. The device senses the hazard, but the alarm has to travel, usually over cellular, sometimes through a gateway or a mesh that relays to cellular, before it reaches anyone. No signal, no alert.
Dead zones are the real-world problem. The places safety wearables matter most, the basement, the tank, the vault, the tunnel, the remote site, are exactly the places cellular coverage is worst. A monitor that alarms loudly to a worker but cannot send the alert out is back to being a standalone device, and the connected rescue you paid for does not happen. Check coverage where the work actually is, and where it is dead, plan for a gateway, a relay, or a different communication path.
Battery is the other half. A wearable that dies mid-shift protects nothing for the rest of it, so the charge routine and the battery life under real use, alarms and transmission included, are part of the buying decision. Verify the device sends an alert from the worst spot on your site, not from the parking lot where the demo went fine.
False alarms and alarm fatigue
False alarms are the quiet killer of a safety-wearable program, because they destroy the response before any real emergency tests it. A man-down sensor set too sensitive reads a dropped detector or a hard sit-down as a fall. A panic button gets pressed in a pocket. A heat or gas alarm trips on a transient that clears in seconds. Each false alarm trains the monitor and the crew that the alarm probably means nothing.
That is alarm fatigue, and it is dangerous in a specific way. The response slows, then stops trusting the device, then someone disables the nuisance alarm, and now the real event arrives at a system everyone has learned to ignore. An operator who switches off a screaming proximity alarm is worse off than one who never had it, because the hazard is still there and the warning is gone.
The fix is tuning, not tolerating. Set the detection thresholds and the alarm delays to the work, per the manufacturer's guidance, so the device alarms on real events and stays quiet otherwise. Track the false-alarm rate as a number and treat a climbing rate as a problem to fix, the same as a missed detection. A wearable program lives or dies on whether the response still believes the alarm.
Privacy and worker buy-in
The data a safety wearable collects is sensitive in a way most jobsite tools are not. Heart rate, core-temperature strain, location, movement: that is body data and whereabouts data, and the worker knows it. Get the privacy wrong and the most reliable outcome is that the device stays in the truck, which protects no one.
Worker buy-in is the whole game, and it rests on a distinction the crew can feel: are you tracking the safety, or surveilling the person? A heat sensor that flags a worker heading for heat illness is safety. The same data used to discipline someone for a slow afternoon is surveillance, and the crew will read it as surveillance the first time it happens. Once they believe the device is watching them rather than watching for them, the program is finished no matter how good the technology is.
Write the policy before the rollout and be plain about it. What is collected, who sees it, what it is used for, what it is never used for, how long it is kept, and the worker's consent. Scope the data to safety and say so out loud. Privacy and labor rules vary by jurisdiction and some are still catching up to this technology, so check what applies where you operate. The honest line to the crew is the true one: this is here to get help to you fast, not to grade your shift. Earn that and they wear it. Break it once and they do not.
Comfort is compliance
Comfort decides whether a safety wearable is worn, and a wearable that is not worn protects nobody. This is the number-one adoption problem, ahead of cost and ahead of the technology itself. If the device is hot, heavy, bulky, or in the way of the work, the worker takes it off, leaves it in the gang box, or never clips it on, and every dollar of detection capability goes to zero.
The form factor matters more than the spec sheet. The wearables that get worn are light, sit out of the way, and ideally integrate into the PPE the worker already carries, clipped to the harness, built into the hard hat, worn like the badge they already wear. A separate device the worker has to remember and tolerate loses to one that disappears into the kit.
So comfort is compliance. Trial the device on real workers doing real work for a full shift, in the heat, and listen to what they say about it, because they are telling you whether the program will survive contact with the job. A slightly less capable device that everyone wears beats the best sensor on the market sitting in a locker.
The data as a leading indicator
Past the live alarm, the data a safety-wearable program collects is a leading indicator you did not have before. Every gas alarm, near-miss, heat flag, and exposure reading is a data point about where the hazards actually are, and aggregated over a crew and a season it draws a heat map of exposure that a once-a-year audit cannot.
Used well, that data feeds back into the controls. A spot that keeps tripping gas alarms is telling you the ventilation plan there is not working. A crew that keeps hitting heat thresholds at the same hour is telling you the work-rest schedule is wrong for that shift. The near-misses that used to go unreported because nobody got hurt now show up as a trend you can act on before the trend becomes an incident.
That is the prevention loop, and it is the part of the wearable that does reach toward preventing the next event, not by stopping this hazard but by fixing the control that let it happen. Read the data to improve the controls. A program that collects all of this and never looks at it has paid for a recorder and thrown away the recording.
Where to start: the highest-risk hazard, then a pilot
Start with the highest-risk hazard, not with everything at once. The crew that tries to roll out gas, fall, heat, location, and fatigue wearables in one season ends up with a pile of half-worn devices and a response that cannot keep up with any of them. Pick the hazard most likely to hurt your people, the gas if you work confined spaces, the heat if you work the summer sun, the lone-worker emergency if your people work alone, and solve that one well.
Solving it well means three things in order, and the device is the easy one. Confirm the response first: who acts, how fast, with what plan. Confirm the workers will wear it: comfort, privacy, buy-in, proven on a real shift. Confirm it will work where the work is: connectivity in the dead spots, battery through the shift. Then buy the device.
Run a pilot before you commit the company. A small group, the real hazard, a real response, a few weeks, and an honest look at what broke. The pilot is where you find the dead zone, the nuisance alarm, the uncomfortable strap, and the call that never got answered, while it is cheap to fix. Scale what survives the pilot. The technology is the smallest part of making this work.
What to document
The wearable program generates records that matter for safety and for proving you ran the program, and they are easy to lose if they live on the device or in someone's memory. Keep them in one place a field tool like FieldOS can hold and timestamp, so the calibration log, the response plan, the privacy policy, and the exposure data are findable when an incident or an inspector asks.
What to keep is the proof that the program is real: the devices in service and assigned, the bump-test and calibration log for the gas monitors, the alarm and response history, the written response plan and call tree, the privacy policy and worker consent, and the exposure and near-miss data the program collected. The calibration log and the response plan are the two an investigator will ask for first.
| Item | Requirement | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Devices in service | Assigned by worker, model, serial | Know who carried what and when |
| Bump test and calibration | Bump before each use, calibrate on the maker interval | Pull any unit that fails the bump |
| Alarm set points | Configured to OSHA limits and the gases present | Do not freelance the thresholds |
| Response plan and call tree | Written, names a person who acts | Test it with a real alarm and time it |
| Alarm and response history | Every alarm and what was done | The record an investigator asks for |
| Privacy policy and consent | What is collected, who sees it, scoped to safety | Required for buy-in and often by law |
| Exposure and near-miss data | Logged and reviewed for trends | Feed it back to fix the controls |
Common mistakes
- Treating a wearable as prevention instead of a faster alarm, so the real controls get skipped behind it.
- Buying the device with no response plan, so the alarm reaches no one who acts.
- Skipping the bump test and calibration on gas detectors, so a dead sensor rides along looking fine.
- Setting alarm thresholds too sensitive, so false alarms train the crew to ignore the device.
- No worker buy-in or privacy protection, so body and location data feels like surveillance and the device comes off.
- Choosing a device too hot, heavy, or in the way to be worn through a real shift.
- No connectivity check, so the alarm cannot send from the basement, tank, or remote site where it matters most.
- Rolling out every hazard category at once instead of solving the highest-risk one first.
Field checklist
Want this checklist to run itself on every job — with photo proof and a signed record crews can hand the customer? That's FieldOS.
Standards and references
OSHA frames the hazards these wearables watch and is the first authority to check. Gas and confined-space atmospheres fall under the confined-space standards and the permissible exposure limits for the specific gases. Heat is covered through OSHA's heat emphasis program and proposed heat standard, and addressed under the general duty clause where no specific standard applies. Struck-by and fall protection have their own standards. Lone work is reached through the general duty to provide a safe workplace and through whichever task-specific standard applies. Confirm the standards and any state plan that applies where you operate, because state OSHA plans can be stricter than federal.
The manufacturer governs the device itself. The calibration interval, the bump-test procedure, the alarm set points, the sensitivity settings, and the battery and connectivity specs come from the maker's manual and the device listing, and recognized guidance such as the International Safety Equipment Association backs the gas-detector practices. The American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists core-temperature limits and exposure references inform the heat and gas thresholds the program is built around. Do not override any of it with habit or guesswork.
Above both sits the site safety plan and the hierarchy of controls. The plan decides which hazard the wearable backs up, what the response is, and how the privacy and the data are handled. Three things carry the whole program: a wearable speeds the rescue but the controls prevent the hazard, you bump-test and calibrate and wire the device to a response that actually acts, and you earn the worker buy-in with comfort and privacy. Get those right and the technology is worth what you paid. Get them wrong and it is an expensive alarm nobody trusts.
Units and terms
The field uses a handful of these terms loosely, so here is what they mean precisely. The difference between a bump test and a calibration, or between detection and prevention, is the difference between a program that works and one that only looks like it does.
- Safety wearable
- A sensor worn on the worker that detects a hazard and alarms for help; it detects and alerts, it does not prevent the hazard
- Personal gas monitor / 4-gas
- A worn detector reading oxygen, combustible gas at the LEL, carbon monoxide, and hydrogen sulfide
- Bump test
- A quick before-use check that exposes the detector to gas to prove the sensors and alarms respond
- Calibration
- A scheduled adjustment of the sensor reading against a certified reference gas to correct drift
- Fall detection / man-down
- A wearable that senses a fall or a no-motion condition and auto-alerts with a location
- Lone-worker system
- Check-in, no-motion, panic button, and location built for the worker who works alone
- Heat-stress wearable
- A device reading heart rate and estimating core-temperature strain to flag heat illness early
- Exoskeleton
- A worn frame that supports the body to reduce strain and musculoskeletal injury; it does not detect or alarm
- Hierarchy of controls
- The ranking of protections strongest first: eliminate, substitute, engineer, administrative, PPE; a wearable sits at or below PPE
FAQ
What are safety wearables?
Safety wearables are sensors worn on the worker that detect a hazard and call for help fast. They cover gas detection, fall and man-down, heat stress, fatigue, proximity, location, and ergonomic exoskeletons. Each detects and speeds the response to a hazard, but none removes it, so the controls still come first.
Do safety wearables prevent accidents?
No. A safety wearable detects a hazard and alerts for help, which speeds the rescue and adds a data layer, but it does not prevent the hazard itself. The gas, the fall, and the heat still happen. The real controls, ventilation, fall protection, and the work-rest cycle, are what prevent them.
What is a personal gas monitor?
A personal gas monitor is a worn detector, usually a 4-gas unit, that reads oxygen, combustible gas at the lower explosive limit, carbon monoxide, and hydrogen sulfide. It alarms when the air turns dangerous. The connected version also sends the alarm and the worker's location to a team that can act on it.
What is a bump test, and how is it different from calibration?
A bump test is a quick before-use check that exposes a gas detector to gas to confirm the sensors respond and the alarms trip. Calibration is the deeper scheduled adjustment that corrects the reading against a reference gas. Bump-test before each use, and calibrate on the manufacturer's interval and after any failed bump.
What is a man-down alarm?
A man-down alarm is a wearable that senses a fall or a no-motion condition and auto-alerts with the worker's location, without the worker pressing anything. It fits the unwitnessed fall, especially the lone worker out of sight, where an unconscious worker cannot call for help. Fall protection still comes first as the control.
How do safety wearables help with heat illness?
Heat-stress wearables read heart rate and estimate core-temperature strain to flag a worker heading for heat illness before they notice it, prompting a break. They support the OSHA-driven controls, the work-rest cycle, water, shade, and acclimatization over 7 to 14 days, but they do not cool the worker or replace those controls.
Why do safety wearables fail in practice?
Most failures are not the sensor. They are no response plan, so the alarm reaches no one; no bump test, so a dead gas sensor rides along; no connectivity, so the alert cannot send from a basement or tank; or no comfort and privacy, so the device stays in the truck unworn.
Are safety wearables a privacy concern for workers?
Yes. Heart rate, core-temperature strain, and location are sensitive body and whereabouts data, and workers know it. Buy-in depends on scoping the data to safety, not surveillance, with a written policy and consent. Track the safety, never grade the shift. Get it wrong and the device stays in the truck, protecting no one.
Where should we start with safety wearables?
Start with the single highest-risk hazard your crew faces, not every category at once. Pick gas for confined spaces, heat for summer work, or the lone-worker emergency for isolated workers. Confirm the response, the worker buy-in, and the connectivity first, then pilot the device on a small crew before scaling it.