Originally published in Electrical Apparatus Magazine.
The Internet made possible things that would have seemed like witchcraft to people who lived a century ago. Even to people who were born more recently, the rapid proliferation of advanced technology enabled by the Internet can be overwhelming. For example: did you know that your phone, your car, and your coffee machine can all be connected and function in harmony? Thanks to the magic of IoT (Internet of Things) technology, that’s the world in which we now live.
IoT technology expands the capabilities of computers that are connected via the Internet to everyday objects, from cars to coffeemakers. This allows those objects to interact in ways that make them more useful...including making them safer for human beings to interact with, or making the environments around them more human-friendly.
In theory, IoT technology could be used to make the home, the road, and the workplace safer. Imagine, for example, a city block in which traffic lights are synced to the same wireless network as pressure-sensitive sensors in the roads, as well as the computers controlling cars traveling on those roads. An IoT network could be used to detect if that car is on a collision course with an object, such as another car; this could trigger some kind of safety mechanism that warns the car’s driver or even activates the car’s brakes, preventing the collision. While this is a hypothetical example, tech firms all over the world are using IoT technology to create inventive solutions like this for everyday problems - including problems that cause physical harm, illness, and death.
I spoke to Dr. Thomas Krause, chairman of the management consulting firm the Krause Bell Group, as well as the chairman of the board of Geolinks, a California-based telecommunications firm. Krause, a respected thought leader in the study of workplace safety, said that he believes IoT technology has a staggeringly wide number of potential benefits...if applied correctly. “There’s the potential for an application in healthcare to be able to tell whether a doctor washes his hands,” he said, “and that’s just one example. there’s a big realm in public safety, which goes into fire detection and prevention, earthquake detection and prevention, and things of that sort. Then there are a whole bunch of industrial applications in process safety and personal safety, maybe more.”
Krause also referred to the San Bruno pipeline explosion, a tragedy that took the lives of eight people in 2010. The explosion happened when the integrity of several pipes in South San Francisco eroded to a critical degree. He said that a similar disaster may be preventable with IoT technology; the integrity of such pipes can be difficult to monitor because they stretch for miles and miles, and because much of them are buried underground. According to him, using a system of sensors connected to a network that could be attached to such pipes, the company monitoring them may be able to detect a similar imminent failure earlier.
To better understand IoT technology from the perspective of the people who create it, I also reached out to David Polanski, co-founder of BuildStream, a tech startup based in Brooklyn, N.Y. Polanski’s company makes hardware and software that uses IoT concepts to track heavy equipment when it’s at a worksite, as well as create three-dimensional digital maps of the worksite, which can be viewed on a wireless device like a smartphone. He said that most contractors currently rely on “antiquated” systems - in other words, systems involving pen-and-paper reports. Polanski said that relying on such “offline” methods can cause operational problems that affect the efficiency of a construction project, especially when reports don’t get updated or forwarded to the right people, or misplaced. Sometimes, he said, these programs can even cause accidents.
Polanski said that Buildstream’s platform not only manages all of this information on an app that everyone in the project can view at all times, but that it can also manage different equipment, like cranes or excavators, from different brands - Volvo, Hitachi, Caterpillar, etc. - that wouldn’t normally be able to connect to each other’s networks. According to him, it can even, depending on the type of equipment, track things like how long a piece of equipment has been onsite, or how long it has been working or idling, as well as tracking fuel information, CO2 emissions, and temperature. “Wherever that data is not sufficient enough, that’s where we use our IoT to provide a live layer of data on top of that so you can actually see how everything is operated so that you can optimize it in real-time.”
Aside from providing clients with a way to keep track of equipment, Polanski explained how Buildstream’s software can also create special zones on the digital map it creates called “safety exclusion zones.” Polanski said that if someone crosses these invisible barriers, the software alerts that person through their phones or similar devices that they have entered an unsafe space.
“A site manager could say something like, ‘you know, I would like to keep people out of this site where we’re currently digging a hole, I don’t want anyone near that equipment, because that’s like really dangerous, big equipment.’ So it gives them a map of where those safety exclusion zones are and tells them in real-time if someone crosses the zone so that they can respond immediately.” He also said that these real-time alerts can show up on mobile apps, such as WhatsApp.
“We connect everyone who is working whether it’s the operator on the equipment, the people at head office, or the health and safety team,” he said. “We link everyone onto this platform so everyone can access it, and basically see the exact information that they need.”
While IoT seems like an incredible technological marvel, there is potentially a major drawback: privacy. If all of our gadgets - from our cell phones to our coffeemakers - are constantly gathering information about us, what is to stop the companies who manage the networks those gadgets are connected to from using that data maliciously?
Dr. Krause called these concerns “Big Brother” issues. In the example he used, an IoT network could be used to verify whether an employee was following a particular safety procedure. While this could help determine the innocence of an employee facing scrutiny for allegedly causing a workplace accident through irresponsible conduct, it could just as easily be used against them.
“You can have sensors, including video cameras, that will tell you just all sorts of stuff about whether or not the worker is following procedure - and that’s an important piece...but it’s real easy to blame the employee there, and employees have gotten sensitive to it for good reason - if you have cameras that can determine whether an employee is wearing protective equipment the way they should, you’re inviting a conflict.”
Krause said that it’s on the person running a business to instill the right attitude that compels the employee to want to follow procedure - not use tech like IoT surveillance systems as a crutch. “The most progressive companies understand that whether or not the worker follows the procedure is dependent on what kind of a job leadership does at setting up rules that the worker can follow, and conveying the value that they should be followed.”
I asked Polanski about Buildstream’s approach to protecting its user’s privacy. “We don’t really collect any data about the operators of the equipment,” he said. “It’s more technical information about the equipment itself. The other thing is that we are structured in a way that we are completely isolated - we only collect the data that the user already owns. By owning the equipment, they also own the data - we just help them visualize things in a much more efficient way than they currently do. That way, there’s no risk for privacy or any issue like that.”
He also said that the team designing Buildstream’s software had to carefully consider the privacy implications of their platform, in part due to the nuances of regulation between international markets. “In the U.K. and in Europe in general, they have a lot of privacy policies now...so we spend quite a lot of time on that. We take a lot of measures to do what the client wants.”
I asked both Krause and Polanski how important they felt privacy protection is when it comes to innovating using IoT technology, or if it’s more important to use the technology to guarantee human safety. “It depends on the value that that data brings,” Polanski said. “We will never do anything that the customer has not agreed to and hasn’t asked for, and I think that’s the approach that every company should take. For us, it’s very clear, because the data is owned by the customer, not by us.”
Krause reiterated his earlier point, that the negative implications of privacy abuse with IoT technology don’t necessarily outweigh the potential safety innovations it could bring...but that when it comes to workplace safety, it’s tricky. “It’s not like you can say, ‘don’t use this information’ once it’s in place...where that goes depends on how intelligent the leaders are at dealing with the issue. I mean, you could certainly use the information - but you could also screw it up very easily, and organizations are good at taking good technology and making it bad, so it’s not a slam-dunk at all in the personnel safety side.”
IoT is still a new technology, and there’s a lot to figure out. There is a saying - “a tool is only as good as the hands that wield it.” While new technology can be terrifying, its harmfulness usually comes down to human behavior - the best way to fix that is for the human in question to choose to be the best they can be. When it comes to striking a balance between protecting someone’s private information and protecting their physical safety, the best solution may be simple: those using it must commit themselves to using it responsibly, and that includes owning any problems it causes. When it comes down to it, it’s on Big Brother to watch when it matters, and look the other way when it doesn’t.