An augmented and interactive aid for occupational safety

Most occupational safety regulations and international standards recognize the importance of keeping a corporate document that set all the safety procedures prescribed for a certain workplace. However, experience show that, to be truly effective, any piece of information must be kept updated and correctly delivered to the right recipient. From this point of view, the possibility, given by modern technology, to receive, process and send information in real time using common smartphones is a great opportunity. The authors developed a solution for mobile devices, which is based on augmented reality technologies and indoor positioning algorithms, aimed at speeding up and simplifying the information flow among safety managers, workers and casual users about safety-related content. Safety managers can use it as a support tool for the preparation of the risk assessment documentation, on the workers’ side, the same application acts as an informational tool providing safety-related content when and where needed through augmented reality technologies. Preliminary results from in situ testing show that augmented reality may be a powerful tool to improve the occupational safety.