New Technologies to Reduce Exposure to Work Hazards

hello and welcome to the second installment of the expanding research partnerships webinar series my name is peter grandello and it is my pleasure to serve as the moderator for today's webinar the presenters and topics are mr sakayla will present on the topic niosh's video exposure monitoring system helmet cam an innovative tool for assessing workers exposure to respirable dust and other contaminants dr keith will present on the topic reducing logging fatality and non-fatal trauma incidence rates with new real-time operational gnss rf communications recommended safety procedures and education some housekeeping reminders this webinar will be conducted using adobe connect software hence the audio will be coming from your computer speakers or earphones if you require some technical assistance from adobe connect please call 1-800-422-3623 this webinar is being recorded and we plan on posting a copy of it in a few weeks you can find a copy of the web web link immediately below live closed captioning will be made available in adobe connect if you require an unedited transcript please email us at d williams24 cdc.gov our third installment of this series will be held on november 14th additional information for this webinar will be posted at www.cdc.gov slash niosh slash oep a brief moment to acclimate people to the adobe connect windows the large main window towards the upper left is the primary window for our presentation going counterclockwise the closed captioning viewer window will stream live captioning during this presentation the file download window provides participants an opportunity to download a pdf copy of today's presentation q a window in today's webinar we will only take written questions through the q a window when asking a question please provide the name of the presenter to whom the question is being asked and please do not include abbreviations or acronyms and your questions finally in the upper right hand corner we provide additional notes for attendees including information for technical link and a link for live closed captioning it is now my pleasure to introduce dr sarah feltner who's the associate director for research integration and extramural performance here at niosh office of extramural programs thank you pete uh this is sarah feltner and i want to welcome everyone and thank you for joining us today we've got two great presentations to continue the discussion that we started last year in denver when we held the expanding research partnerships conference on the university of colorado campus so i'm pleased to introduce our speakers and also remind you as pete mentioned we'll take questions at the end and you'll be able to put those into the instant message q a box and we'll be able to discuss the presentations after so i'd like to start now without any further ado introduce andy sakala from uh our very own niosh um mining uh division and andy why don't you go ahead and begin please okay um it's a pleasure to to be here and to uh to be able to present to you um pete talk uh gave the title but the work we've been doing on our video exposure monitoring system that we've entitled helmet cam and how we've used this to uh to assess restful dust and how now it's moving into other contaminants before i get started i'd like to recognize my co-researcher and author of many of the papers dr emily haas and more recently justin patz also has been very involved in the helmet cam research so over the next 20 minutes i'm going to quickly go through and talk just a little bit about silica exposure the development of silicosis the health effects and what the dust standards are today how we actually got into the this helmet cam technology and assessment and explain to you how we use it talk a little bit about our research interventions and studies that have been performed and through these studies some engineering controls and quick fixes that we saw that have been common throughout the mining industry and then close uh talking about where we see the future of helmet cam going so three three um silicosis outbreaks that i'd like to discuss that have kind of set the the standard for where we are today with the regulation so the first study was a missouri lead minor study uh you could see this was performed back in 1915 and in missouri there were approximately 7 000 lead miners about half of those worked in uh one particular county called jasper county and they were about three quarters of the workers who were underground about about one quarter a thousand on the surface so in the study they examined um 720 of of these workers from jasper county and they saw that there that about 66 of these workers were suffering from some type of pulmonary disease and about 46 percent showed definite signs of silicosis and you can see 14 with minors consumption in tb uh this next slide shows the typical vermont granite operation you can see the haze of dust in the air and the first study here was performed by a dr hoffman in 1919 and in his study you could see he examined 420 of these granite cutters and felt that 93 of them or 399 were definitely being affected by silicosis five years later in a study by a doctor russell he found that when workers were in the trade at least four years they were showing at least early signs of silicosis the two pictures on the right hand side are from a cemetery up in vermont and i think they're they're you know very touching a matter of fact the the bottom um uh with the with the uh name brew shop this worker ash and this both of these workers chiseled their tombstone and in his case he actually chiseled himself dying in his wife's arms because he knew ultimately this would be what would take his life the last study or effort where silicosis was a major issue was the goalie mine bridge hawkness project and this was a a three-mile tunnel driven through a mountain in southern west virginia for a hydroelectric power work and you can see within a short time after this project there were 476 deaths associated with acute silicosis and obviously the ore that they were driving this tunnel through contain high levels of silica so in the upper right hand corner shows you know the many different industries throughout our country where workers are exposed to restful crystalline silica in the bottom left obviously silicosis isn't is an issue but also lung cancer and many other diseases and disorders though you know definitely a a major concern this next slide shows the current dust standard in our country the top one for mining uh which is regulated by the my safety and health administration the standard uses the equation and this is for restful dust 10 divided by the cent percent silica plus two so basically it's a close to a 100 microgram standard for niosh we've had a recommended exposure limit for many years at 50 micrograms and i think most people know that osha implemented a 50 microgram standard approximately two years ago and on the on the bottom shows the enforcement date of how this is being implemented throughout the industry with with you know 2021 the implementation of all engineering controls so for the mining program for niosh you can see our mission statement to eliminate mining fatalities injuries and illnesses through relevant research and impactful solutions and i say a lot that our our goal is to be honest brokers of science and technology we go out and do the research and just let the facts speak for themselves so how how did we get into this helmet cam assessment technology well for for our dust branch what we do quite often is we always look at the mine safety and health administration's compliance sampling and look at miners throughout the country they're being over exposed to dust we also in the metal non-metal sector have a very close working relationship with the industry and a lot of the operations come to us share their own internal results and and you know request our assistance in different areas and then the third area is we spend a lot of time in the field uh talking directly with minors and through our own observations and uh one thing that we saw um and was if you look on this slide here on the left hand side we have four different job classifications as identified by amsha so laborer mechanic utility man cleanup man um and so if you look at these the we would consider these all mobile workers and if you look at the spawn the the data is from 20 2003 through 2012 and you may say this is dated but the reason we're showing this is because this is the information that really drove when we started in this helmet cam technology but anyhow for the sand and gravel industry you can see that all the samples taken um in this uh in the for contaminated between four and sixteen percent of these samples uh the workers were overexposed for stone quarries uh the same a java classification codes between five and eleven percent overexposed and for metal mining between 13 and 22 percent over exposures so obviously these mobile workers were getting uh overexposed but what what was the cause of this exposure so that led right into this video exposure monitoring system assessment system that we've can helmet cam so initially in the upper right hand corner we placed a the video camera on the worker's helmet uh in the bottom right hand side you can see a blue instrument um and that's the thermo 1500 um a dust monitor and so we were taking a sample on the worker every two seconds and in the center is the 10 millimeter cyclone that classifies the respirable section then we also you know have the video in this case uh this had a logger and on the left hand side is uh co-worker justin pat and you can see in his case we've actually gone to placing the video camera on the shoulder so when we would go out initially to do these studies we would give the miners three different types of options on how to wear the helmet cam instrumentation the first uh was the camelback on the very left then we gave the the miners two different types of minor safety belts that they could wear or a safety vest and this shows what we call evade the original acronym stood for enhanced video analysis of dust exposure and it we had we designed this software which merged the video and the exposure together so in the upper right hand corner it's actually showing what the workers doing and on the bottom it's showing the workers uh restful dust concentration which would change every two seconds so right now you can see the worker is exposed to um 179 micrograms per cubic meter he opened this chute and and you can see that's where the green line showing and here shortly uh his exposure is even going to peak even higher so we originally did the beta testing or validation testing on this helmet cam technology and you can see the dates and we really want to thank these operations that worked with us to test this new technology and you can see that we worked with approximately 120 miners and we had very successful results the miners after seeing what their exposure was bought into it and had a very positive working relationship just two really quick things that we found from this uh it just as an example in the in the first operation that we went to they operated one shift per day so as they would shut down and the product sat for 16 hours it would have it would acquire moisture and so the next morning when they started up if they would allow the product to go through the screening process it would have through the night it acquired moisture and it would have caused the screens to bind up so what they would do is they would have a worker go and manually set this deflector shield to deflect the product until new product that had been heated was coming through with the moisture content down well you can see right here this workers exposure again setting this deflector plate was 1400 micrograms per cubic meter so when this operation saw the exposure to the worker they automated the process with two pneumatic cylinders so one would swing it in place the other one would lower it they could watch the moisture content in the control room once it decreased to an acceptable level they would disengage the pneumatic cylinders and allow the product to flow to the screening area a second site that we tested with where they were loading the flexible intermediate ball containers and these are the one in two ton big white sacks that you see at industrial processing facilities when they would change from one product size to another they would empty the silo out into this uh into this hopper and it was on a a forklift so they would just typically place the hopper on the ground and you can see the the worker was uh loading the hopper and so for five trials that uh during our helmet cam evaluation at this facility the workers exposure for this product size was 1160 micrograms but we realized that the greater the drop distance the more restful dust that's generated so just as a trowel we said why don't you raise the the uh hopper up just so you're able to still see the loading height and so when the worker did this for seven trials we were able to lower his exposure down to 240 micrograms just by this simple modification which was an 80 percent reduction and this was something that was very quickly validated through the helmet cam technology so this was so successful on our initial study that we partnered with dr dr emily haas to do more of an intervention study and we worked with five different mining companies and you can see over 2015 2016. emily would originally interview

all the miners then we would place the helmet cam on them and then with emily and i would sit down and go through the footage with them we would show the health and safety personnel send the report and then return somewhere between four and eight weeks again and and work with the same miners again to see what changes maybe they were able to do in their work practices there were cases where the companies instituted engineering controls and now it was very uh a very uh you know worthwhile win-win situation for um all involved uh one example that we saw during the first testing was that workers changing screens or cleaning screens were we're seeing high exposures so during this intervention study we partnered with badger mining company and rotex incorporated which is a major screen manufacturer around the world they're actually located in cincinnati and so we worked with them and rotec actually designed a new what they call a segmented panel screen typically it took two workers so ergonomically the screen was much more effective than the original design it was able to be changed by one worker and you can see from a restful dust standpoint um the new screen design also lowered the workers exposure by 66 so very effective ergonomically and from a dust control standpoint one area that we saw as a common problem throughout all these studies were a lack of ventilation filter ventilation in controlled areas and this just shows one case in a in a lab where exposures were high this shows that an operation and we're going to show a quick video here uh pete's going to pull this over and so this is actual helmet cam footage so the worker here is in a screening tire and he's going to be walking into what they call a splitter shock and you'll see on the back wall a fan that isn't operating and so when we asked them we said well why isn't this fan operating as you're performing this test they said well um it really doesn't do anything we have to crawl under the table to plug it in but look at how the workers exposure increased it's up to around 400 micrograms per cubic meter while he's performing this test so when we returned for the second shift at this operation emily actually crawled under the table and plugged the fan in go ahead pete if you want to start the second video and uh so um here what you'll see is that um the fans running and the worker walks in and his exposure never increases you can see it's down between 20 and 40 micrograms you can see the fan running and his exposure stays at this much lower level because they're bringing the air in from from outside so when we showed this footage to the workers by the time we arrived at the facility the next day to continue our testing they had the maintenance shift which was graveyard actually wire the fan into the light switch and so moving forward the fan would always be running when the worker was in performing in this task so they they solved the problem immediately which shows the impact that the helmet cam information had this shows another example where two workers were working side by side changing canisters in the local exhaust ventilation system the worker on the left had a contaminated work hoodie on the worker on the right had a clean hoodie and over a 12-minute segment through the helmet cam we saw that because of this contaminated work hoodie the worker's exposure was three times higher than that of his co-worker the sad thing is at this facility they had a closed cleaning system that niosh designed in that same building so this next slide shows a lot of information and i'm not going to go through it point by point but what i do want to emphasize is that these were common exposures that we saw at multiple facilities and these were simple um solutions or interventions that were implemented to lower workers exposure and i'll go through a few of these um i also want to say that we've now gone from evade one to of a2 much greater versatility with this you can use multiple videos multiple exposure assessments you can time sync different things emily actually produced a video on how to perform the assessment with evade and it's on youtube and our nyu's website as posted here and this just shows uh we've also with this of a2 we've gone from just restful dust to diesel particulate noise organic compounds chemicals again i said multiple video and and login channels so a lot more versatility with the new software and it's available on our website also also some quick uh fixed solutions one tying these intermediate ball containers if a worker would position the caller away from them they're able to lower their exposure by 92 percent and these are some quick one-page write-ups that are available um with the close cleaning booth by using the booth and as i mentioned at this facility um they actually had the close cleaning booth in the same structure you're able to reduce exposures up to 88 percent contaminated seats when there's cloth material we've seen high exposure all the operations so we recommend going to plastic or vinyl chairs or putting uh vinyl or leather seat covers over any type of cloth material also with housekeeping anytime you uh uh hosing down is a very effective tool but what we learned is you're better off to start with a wide spray pattern and then go to a more narrow and forceful stream with our co-workers in cincinnati uh you can see all the different chemical assessments that they've used today so it is being expanded all into other areas m-shows tech support has adopted using this when they go out to assist mining operations we spoke with them last year this time and they are using it both for dust and their physical and toxic agent divisions we've been going around the country over the last couple years trying to get the word out so you can see the different associations that we've worked with and you can also see in the bottom it's not only being used in the united states but it's being used around the world so what we've tried to do is get these different mining associations to adopt this and offer it to their member companies we realize that some mining companies if they're having issues may not want to call the government and ask for our assistance so it would be much more comfortable uh contacting their association and working out any bugs with them where we see this going in the future is workers with multiple assessments on on themselves fed to a control room and uh and being able to adjust engineering controls to lower their workers exposures um and so we see a lot of a lot of modifications and improvements to protect workers through this technology so in closing we've tested this on over 200 miners to date we appreciate all the working relationship with the industry and it's been a really a win-win situation and again i want to thank dr emily haas and justin pat and everyone that's participated and worked with us and i thank you for the opportunity to present this technology to you today thank you very much andy for that great uh presentation on the exciting work that you're doing with such great partnerships built into it we really appreciate learning about that and as i mentioned we're going to hold questions until the end and so i'd like to introduce now dr robert keefe director of the university of idaho experimental forest who's going to talk to us about logging fatality and injury prevention dr keith okay thank you sir just waiting for the presentation to pop up there okay so my name is rob keefe i am an associate professor of forest operations at the university of idaho i teach the logging systems classes in our forestry program here and my subject area is traditionally focused on research to quantify work activities more for production efficiency purposes and i've kind of migrated over the years into safety research but if it if my language sounds funny it's because i come from that kind of land-grant university forestry background and moved into public health research and not the other way around and and i'm also the director of our university of idaho experimental forest which is a 10 000 acre working forest it's the area outlined in yellow here and that is managed by students in our in our college of natural resources we harvest quite a bit of timber operationally each year both with professional logging contractors and also with an active student logging crew and we prescribe burn about 150 acres every year and uh just last week planted 60 000 conifer seedlings that were grown by students in our in our research nursery here and so i'm sort of a professor of practice on top of that we also have uh short and long-term research funded through nsf usda doe dod and of course nih and so it's kind of a fun fun job keeping track of all the logistics on the forest so when i first put this together i tried to do a quick summary of our research on this project and i had about 70 60 or 70 slides and so i've tried to pair that way down to stay within the time frame and i'll move fairly quickly to keep on track so logging this is a typical logging operation in the pacific northwest this is cable logging you can see a large about 110 or 120 foot tall tower here which we call the yarder tower yarder and then there's a skyline cable you can't quite make out running down the hill and most of our many of our fatalities that happen on uh cable logging operations are going to be uh down in what we call in the rigging which is the individuals who are working down the hill out of sight from the from the yarder operator on top attaching choker cables wire rope cables around trees that are then going to be yarded or pulled up the hill to the landing up here and so we have a number of ground workers working uh in and around heavy equipment and uh they're fairly low visibility operations the fatality rate uh in is typically at or near the top of the list for occupations in 2015 we were at 132.7 fatalities per 100 000 ftes according to the bureau of labor statistics and when i was hired on the faculty as an assistant professor i toured around the northwest to meet with industry and state and federal and private forestry and one of the things that really struck me as i visited a tree farm that looked a lot like this this one in washington and they had had two fatalities and two near fatalities in a five month period before when i visited and all were on similar operations to this all four of those were uh ground workers on the rigging crew that were involved in struck by accidents uh hit by by trees or logs that were being yarded up the hill and i thought at the time you know we really ought to be able to do something better with technology in this day and age to make it to make the equipment operators more aware of where groundworkers are on the hillside and it pertains to those those workers under the skyline system and it also pertains to hand fallers who are working with chainsaws maybe a half mile away off by themselves in the woods and there are also some other spatial applications if everyone had a location that could be seen by other workers on the job site on a phone or a tablet i thought you know that would would generally make make things safer by improving situational awareness and the challenge is really that we're in a limited cell phone connectivity environment and there's no internet there's no there's no wi-fi that we're used to in urban areas and so part of it is is getting the location and part of it is sharing that with other people in an effective and a fairly quick way this is typical more typical for idaho western washington or eastern washington western montana it's a smaller cable yarder on the hill but we still have you know the the heavy equipment working up here three or four pieces of heavy equipment there's a processor and a loader that are that are out of the way here they look like large excavators swinging trees around and then three or four ground workers who you'll notice you can't see there's tall vegetation down low they may work in low light conditions smoky conditions during fire season and and that's kind of the crux of the problem so in other fields we um we have are looking mining in particular you know we we look to uh radio frequency tag identification as a possible solution the the distances and the topography and and sort of forest interaction make it challenging for those solutions to to work well in forestry where it's kind of an awkward distance where you know people may be as much as a half a mile or a mile apart and things like bluetooth or rfid tend not to work very well at those distances this is a a worker effect this position is affectionately called the hooker they're hooking the choker cables on the trees down the hill and he is then going to slip trip and fall his way into a safe area called in the clear just across the hill this tree will then be pulled up by the yarder and the total cycle for that tree to be pulled up and the carriage to come back down to get the next couple of trees is is typically uh two and a half minutes or so so it happens very quickly and so he has a short amount of time to get out of the way and get back this is a physician called the chaser who's at the top of the hill he's waiting for the trees to come up and he is then going to once they're dropped in front of him he's going to run out and unhook the choker cable and this may be unsure footing they do wear spike boots typically but the slopes are 40 to 00 70 or 80 percent or more and so these trees may slip and slide a bit themselves back down the hill so how do we what is gps what is gnss that we used in here gps is the american global positioning system developed by the department of defense for military applications and then made available to the public many of you have used a handheld gps like a garmin up here in the left-hand corner that is going to use some fancy math uh and uh a satellite constellation uh doing trilateration to determine your location on the ground and tell you where you are on a map that you can see displayed about 10 years ago some some devices geared toward safety in remote areas were developed like spot receivers or inreach explorers made by delorum originally that could then take that location and and in an emergency you could press an sos button and they would send it back through a satellite system as opposed to a cell cell tower that is probably not available in in remote forested areas and it would go to someone off in an office somewhere and and that's kind of helpful but but not not for all safety situations it's kind of a limited number of safety situations that that's helpful for and then we have things like this this top right example and the lower left one that are more uh military grade gnss radios so they're they're using the the global positioning system and they're integrating it with a two-way radio so that there's a gnss receiver on here a little antenna and it's getting a location and then it's using the two-way radio to send it to another device so that um without cell service without wi-fi uh someone in the woods could see uh someone else and these are you know traditionally have been used solely in the military by special forces and um but the technology is is what we were interested in uh kind of exploring and using for logging safety purposes and then these lower kind of the lower center and the lower right cells are a newer technology that has really evolved very quickly over the course of our research on this grant uh that and these are these are miniaturized radios those little things you see with the circles around them in the lower right corner here they're they're miniaturized two-way radios that pair with smartphones or what we're working on now pair with even a wristwatch that has gps in it and and then function like the military radios they they're able to send communications in remote areas without cell service so that you could for example send a text message to someone off in the remote northwoods of idaho or alaska even though there's no cell service and it would be using a radio frequency instead of uh instead of the cell tower and so we have been you know really interested in this technology the timing was just kind of a a really great coincidence that these have evolved a number of companies producing these just over the last two years while we started on this research and we have explored any and all of these options in here and looked at the pros and cons with loggers there are trade-offs you can imagine among cost among bandwidth how much data they can send around among weight how heavy they are to carry among user friendliness is it something that a logger could could or would want to use so for example some of these radios have fairly complex software and they're they're not very easy to use uh the phones tend to be plug and play you know download an app and and all of a sudden it works quite well so there are these trade-offs our goal our the structure of our uo1 grant that we received through niosh is is kind of really emphasized integrating logging contractors into the research process uh at two phases initially we wanted to talk to them uh do some sort of qualitative surveys and interviews to to understand their perspectives on whether this this idea seems like a useful one in general and also have them help us inform what kinds of hazard situations on the job site it might be most useful for and which things it might not be a good idea for could potentially make things worse for example and then uh and then in phase two we have a series of very very carefully controlled designed experiments to understand the accuracy of some of the different systems and also to evaluate some of those um those hazard situations identified by logging contractors in a in a controlled setting um and and also do some some operational sampling where we get out on logging operations and and have the radios in use and really see how they work we then develop some draft general recommendations for for use of this technology in log and safety applications and then go back to the loggers again this is really about where we are now we've gone back to the loggers and and have their feedback on kind of our preliminary results from here and uh the different technologies that are available and ask them again you know what do they think now are we still on the right track and then and then we wrap this up next year so that's where we are and i'm going to focus mostly on kind of these design phase 2 experiments here for the next few slides what we found or what we heard from contractors in the initial conversations when the when the project was initiated were really that there are a whole bunch of situations where where there's a spatial component people near equipment people uh you know underneath the log decks that may slide or roll down the hill people cutting trees individually off by themselves where we may want to uh locate them if they're hurt and and this list this is only the top nine uh sort of uh you know situations where this might be of interest but there are you know there were 20 fluffs on here and they're all things that happen you know no one one incident occurs all the time they're they're all things that occur occasionally which has the benefit really you know for our for this technology the potential benefit there is really to increase a broad situational awareness at the at the job side of where people are and what they're doing uh making that information available to equipment operators in particular a little bit better and so we heard quite a bit about a few particular situations this picture is a hand faller he's got a chainsaw you can sort of see through the bushes there but you know we heard the faller could definitely see where the other guy that is that's working with him is uh knows how far away he is uh people could notice that he's been sitting in the same spot for 15 minutes and the dot hasn't moved we need to get over and check on him the the yarder operator a lot of times can't see the hookers down like down in the lower part of the unit so yeah i do think gps could be beneficial in some areas so those were kind of things we'll focus on in in this the rest of this talk or how could we use the technology to to potentially improve on these situations and understand if it's a good idea to use it for these purposes so first experiment i'll talk about is a designed experiment on the on the school forest that we set up and it was it was to look at a couple of different factors that are involved in in this working on the ground one is how quickly are the locations being sent to someone else are they being sent every two and a half seconds every five seconds or every 10 seconds how quickly is a as a hand faller walking and uh if we had some sort of safety geofence set up around or a proximity alert sort of a hazard area around a hand faller cutting trees how much does the the size of that uh affect uh the quality of of hazard alerts for other people at the job site and so we did the very controlled experiment where we used the survey grades one centimeter accuracy gps marked all these points along this long course in the woods and had other personal location devices perpendicular to that fixed locations and we and we walked over this course repeatedly and at each point you know at each intersection point we know exactly when the the hand faller crossed the the safety zone or the hazard zone and and then we know exactly when based on the data an alert was received and we can look at the delay the difference between when they actually crossed into a hazardous area and when they're perceived to have crossed into that for some you know equipment operator looking at a computer screen or a tablet and we wanted to understand uh what you know whether that's uh whether there are potential interruptions or delays or issues to think about with with using that for safety purposes and we found pretty interesting results there's a very really clear geometric pattern that you would expect but it's a little bit counter-intuitive basically if you walk by someone and you have this proximity alert based on the gps location associated with you as you as you brush past someone there's a greater error than when you're working directly towards walking directly toward them and that alert is actually premature it happens beforehand and so this is a bit of a concern we we replicated that with a simulation experiment all coded in an r script on a computer and and wanted to verify that it was it was showing up when we based it on simulation and and saw the same effect here and so that's a bit of a concern that's something to think about there are at least two companies producing now just over the last two years produced starting to produce some geospatial software that have safety applications using using geofences around around individuals at the job site and so this is a concern and something to be aware of that there's there's potentially some error associated with those alerts so next experiment i'll talk about a little bit is is uh that's that's interesting but let's try to understand this over the over the forested landscape how is this going to affect a variety of different operations in the woods and so again on the experimental forest we went to 21 different forest stands these are anywhere from uh eight to 25 acres in size each of these little polygons you can see on the map there and they range from bare ground that looks like a clear cut or a golf course up to the old mature trees and in all those different conditions we uh we monumented this sort of uh triangular plot design with a a faller crossing a geo fence uh or an individual crossing a geo fence in the center of the plot and then uh three radios out at uh at equal angles and we we quantified all the line of sight issues in between the radios all the rocks and vegetation and we wanted to understand uh how much was the the gnss error affected by the tree canopy above and how much was the what was the potential for a missed signal due to line of sight issues in the radio frequency so there are two different things going on there and in these systems you have the gps accuracy and then you have the radio transmission quality also and we weren't sure if one or both matters and we found with this very clear results this was published in uh plus one that the missed radio transmissions were affected by the forest characteristics by the topography was it uh concave or compact convex ground that they're at and the line of sight variables that were that we quantified we found also the the gnss accuracy itself the quality of your position location was affected only by the forest characteristics and the overall delay was affected a little bit by both the forest and the topography characteristics okay so that's that's useful information to know and things we want to think about and sort of build into recommendations and and then but let's let's get down and dirty and go to some logging operations which you know make for make for better pictures here in the presentation and and uh so we went to three active logging sites in north idaho all uh industrial operations and and put radios on anything and everything really and uh there's uh ann one of our graduate students putting a tablet in the yarder so that the operator can see everyone's locations there's me uh looking for a spot to put a radio that's uh outside the carriage somewhere where it won't be where the steel won't interfere with the signals and and basically we have three hazards on each operation we have a standing dead tree down in the lower right with the yellow circle around it that's what we call a snag uh fixed hazard we have uh the carriage itself that runs up and down on the skyline and that's a mobile moving hazard with a with a fixed hazard area around it as it moves and then the loader the log loader which is the other yellow circle there with a hazard area encircling it on top of the hill and all the ground workers at least three ground workers on each of these three logging operations uh had their locations bounced around to everyone else in one second intervals so a radio burst was sent every second so that everyone could see locations and what this allowed us to do was was quantify how often what was the frequency of time they were within uh you know an unsafe area adjacent to those hazards one or more we also wanted to understand how much does the canopy error uh the forest canopy error in the gnss signal affect whether they're considered safe or unsafe so in other words if they're in if they're outside of a safe area and we think they're safe what's the possibility that we might they might actually be inside uh and and be in a dangerous area and that was done through simulation these are the control plots used to develop the error for mature forest canopy and bare ground you can see over 30 minutes these are radios on zip ties to wooden stakes over 30 minutes in a forest canopy those locations move around a lot on the bottom row whereas in a clear cut on the top row they stay very fixed there's very very high accuracy good quality and we encounter both of those on logging operations because we go from a mature canopy to bare ground in these clear-cut operations this figure shows for the three timber sails on the on the y-axis [Music] and for the three hazards across the x-axis or across the x-columns uh how frequently were they in uh within the unsafe zone and and uh and in any uh distance increment from those hazards in meters across the x-axis and so the orange is in an unsafe area and so for example for the snag on the top right 6 000 individual seconds about 100 minutes were spent over three work days in unsafe areas these data are based on simulation going back and and basically applying the error we estimated in controlled conditions based on the canopy or cut to see if they if we may have if we may incorrectly classify them as safe or unsafe based on the known error for a forest canopy and we find that we do for six of nine hazard and site combinations we they may be in a an unsafe area but be classified as safe or vice versa and so that's a concern so we have presented those results to loggers at our professional logging education workshops in idaho over 300 loggers this year and over 300 loggers two years ago as well with what we knew at the time and um have generated some nice educational materials and and um sort of informed them about the current results and then asked them uh to give us feedback again about whether you know what what's the right way to proceed and do they see value in this technology and and overwhelmingly they have not used the technology before these highlighted cells are just uh summary statistics just more than 50 is highlighted in a darker color and so most have not used this technology for safety before but if we look kind of to the improve likelihood of improvement to safety by device and improvement by particular features we get a really strong positive response we get you know emergency receivers two-way radios smartphone based receivers all are likely to to improve safety according to our professional loggers in in the inland northwest the only one that doesn't register there is automatic updates to supervisors we also asked whether you know they had privacy concerns and that was thoughts that was leading into that and they they said no they did not have privacy concern issues with either co-workers or supervisors seeing locations and most importantly for us they carry smartphones that's a change that's a relatively recent change our demographic is more than 70 percent are over 40 in idaho more than 50 percent are over 50 and and so smartphone usage is not something to take for granted but we do have a recent influx in smartphone use by by our older demographic logging workers so this is a fraction of the you know the studies that we have on this project and we could only cover so much in in the webinar but it gives you a little bit of a slice of what we're working on and in general there's there's wide support in interest in the use of these kinds of solutions to improve logging safety we know for sure in our recommendations and and received feedback in support of this uh in the with the draft recommendations that we presented the loggers that geofences should be really used only for broad situational awareness and not for operational decision making with equipment operations so we we know the accuracy is is quite poor or varies a lot between devices and so we don't want uh in any way equipment operators making decisions based on detailed proximity alerts in the woods because the accuracy just isn't there for most of the current technology but it is really useful for a general situational awareness and that's that's a good thing the accuracy varies a lot um and it's not always intuitive your phone may have better accuracy than some of the dedicated radios that were built originally for the military because uh your phone gets a number of different satellite constellations like the russian the chinese the european constellations it receives more satellite information and may actually have as good or better accuracy than some radios that cost two to three thousand dollars more apiece bluetooth enabled radios those miniature radios the ones shown in the picture down here that pair with phones uh are are what we believe the the most promising solution based on logger feedback accuracy everything we look at uh user friendliness the most promising solution and what we're focusing on now we're evaluating those operationally this year the advantage there is that we can pair them with other sensors on phones also to develop smart alerts so instead of just a gps location staying in one place indicating someone may be hurt we also have accelerometers and sound meters and the nice thing about this solution is that it's independent of heavy equipment software it's something that can work everyone can have consistent software based on the phone system and and that's a good thing the type 1 and type 2 error analysis from our operational study is is really interesting and i think applies uh to other spatial analysis in safety research and when we're uh that's something we're exploring in a in a subsequent publication and just in general the success of our grant i'll wrap up with the slider i think the success of this is really that we've we've kept loggers and foresters and others informed throughout the process we have multiple companies of different sorts that are working on developing this technology for safety applications now we were featured on the cover of the timberwest the largest logging trade magazine in the in the western us up there on the right last year and that carriage that we saw in a lot of the pictures the eagle carriage that company is actually producing their own system now as of a month ago they have it available that does essentially the same thing that we're working on here and they're you know taking our information into account as they work on that with that i went over a few minutes and so i'll wrap up and uh thank you for your time thank you very much rob um we are running uh short on time and so i'd like to go right to the audience to see if anyone has any questions you can type them into the q a box on your screen and if you have if you can identify whether the question is for andy or for rob that will help us direct direct the question to the right person any questions from the audience um pete are you watching the let's see questions about slides yes i am one one is a technical question about slides being available in powerpoint the slides are available in pdf under the download files in the bottom right hand corner we are seeing some questions popping up just give us a moment as we screen the questions while we're waiting let me ask both of you um andy first and then rob since both of these projects were you know so nicely applied to the particular industry and worker population that they're they're focused on obviously the partnerships are key any thoughts about you know sort of best practices for how to get these partnerships established or you know was there was there follow-up information that you provided the the workers um that may have been some other benefit for them for participating or wondering if you had any briefly any thoughts about that andy let me go to you first um i mean we didn't provide the workers any like gifts or anything like that and it was voluntary i mean no one was forced to participate but um you know initially we go in we explain to them you know that we're there to really protect them and that you know we're looking at it from a dust control standpoint so we said you know it's beneficial um you know if you do certain tasks if you could do those tasks while you're wearing this another example that we saw is from in one in one situation we saw high exposures in mobile equipment it was in a haul truck and by the time that we had returned the company had already bought not brand new haul trucks but newer haul trucks that had a filtration and pressurization system in them and the the miner came to us and thanked us because he said without you guys coming and showing the exposure we would have never this would have never happened so you know i i they really bought into it they knew that we were there you know trying to help them and it was a real it was a real positive and um situation from both the worker and from management standpoint they appreciated us being able to pinpoint where there were elevated exposures so and did they get that information rather than an incentive i was thinking of or by incentive i was thinking of you know did they get any of any uh results or or helpful information from your uh intervention work that might have oh yeah we would when we yeah after the first you know after the first uh visit then we would send them a report a week or two later and then you know when we return for the second visit then we follow up and then there would be a follow-up like six months later also with them so we we kept in really good contact with them and you know tried to provide whatever information that they needed suggestions you know we give them uh papers or whatever we could to assist them great thank you and i see there's a question for rob pete do you want to go ahead and ask that sure thank you yes a question for rob did you have any issues with the gps signal quality in the north south or the north northeast south southwest drainages also often there is very low coverage in these steep drainages yes that's a great question and it is something we tested for in a couple of those early designed experiments uh and and we did see an effect uh that second study that i mentioned there there is a little bit of an aspect effect in there um it's relatively minor you know when we control everything it's relatively minor compared to the the canopy and kind of light line of sight impacts on both well canopy impacts on on the gps quality and the line of sight impacts on on the radio but it is an effect it tends to be smaller than some of the other forest effects thank you very much and we have another question for rob yarder operator is a pretty intense job for uh job any thought on how they would be able to access process this positional data yeah so in our field trials we've done it with a tablet you know it's about a nine inch tablet that's just on the you know it's on a window inside the yarder and um and so they're able to glance down at that you know they're most equipment operators are used to seeing a screen at some point and um and in looking at their you know their their computer for different uh information as they work so it's not a dramatic change for them um they they certainly have a lot going on but uh you know we we want it to be an extra piece of information uh and not you know the sole piece of information they're using so we still you know there's there's certainly the assumption that they still are going to be using uh cocky tutors or audio signals for safety purposes but this gives supplements that with a little bit more information they can see that that someone is is over across the hill and they can maybe verify that by radio or something else before making a decision but it's a little bit more information and they have tended to like that when we've been out with operators on the job well um i'm sorry to say that we're out of time it's always the challenge when there's so much to present and and talk about but we want to thank both of our presenters um both andy and rob for this really exciting and interesting applied partner-based work that you're doing um in these dangerous industries and thank all of you for joining us today and hope you'll join us again for our third webinar which will be sometime later in the fall and we'll send out notices about that in advance so thank you all very much for joining us and we look forward to seeing you again at a future webinar you

2022-03-11 12:58

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