Smart Safety Helmets: How Wearable Technology Improves Head Safety with Embedded Certification Tracking

March is Brain Injury awareness month and for good reason: every nine seconds in the United States a person sustains a brain injury. And for those who work in industrial and construction settings, that risk is heightened. Furthermore, 1,200 work-related traumatic brain injuries (TBI) fatalities occur annually in the US, with half of those deaths happening in industries such as construction, transportation, farming, forestry, and fishing. (CDC)

Therefore, improving head safety is mission critical for organizations within these industries to better protect works from TBIs or even death. Part of that is creating safer helmets and doing away with the traditional hard hats.

• Type II safety helmets compared to type I hard hats are much more effective as they provide 360-degree head safety versus traditional hard hats that only are rated to protect the top of the head.
• Type II helmets also leverage better materials that provide greater protection, including new materials such as Koroyd welded tube polymer, which, compared to traditional EPS foam or a head harness, provides significantly more protection from angled impacts.
• Many Type II helmets also feature chin straps, such as Fidlock chin straps, that make it easy to buckle or unbuckle while wearing heavy gloves.

In addition to improved materials, type II helmets may also utilize embedded technology that enables improved incident response in the event an accident does occur:

• Embedded near field communication (NFC) chips inside safety helmets provide key info to first responders about the health of the wearer and crucial information such as emergency contacts and medical allergies that will help improve outcomes.
• Even prior to an incident, data in the chips can help wearers conduct effective audits of the equipment to ensure the worker wears the helmet properly. For example, if the equipment is expired or is damaged in some way that requires replacement, the worker and issuer will have confidence that the PPE needs to be replaced, and if it is still in good condition, they have confidence the helmet will work as intended during an accident.
• Thirdly, such a chip can also store information regarding certifications, including things like specific vaccinations for working in a hospital environment, or for operating certain types of heavy equipment on the job site—instead of carrying around a stack of papers in your truck, you can have all that information right in the helmet to maintain compliance without losing productivity.

With the integration of chips to provide more data about specific PPE, such as safety helmets, this information can become part of an organization’s digital transformation in addition to ensuring improving improved safety measures by aiming to automate the PPE inspection and auditing process at the individual level.

From inception, STUDSON had one goal in mind: to consistently deliver the most innovative head protection in the industrial market so workers can get home safe every night. Visit https://studson.com/ to learn more.