Emerson launches Location Awareness, a new industrial safety offering in its Plantweb digital ecosystem that protects employees at refineries, chemical plants and oil and gas platforms. Emerson’s Location Awareness technology could help reduce more than 70% of common personnel-recordable incidents, according to the company. Used for safety mustering and man-down events, Location Awareness gives managers a snapshot of employee locations through rechargeable wearable tags. In an emergency, managers can quickly account for employees’ locations in the plant or facility.
With scalable features, Emerson’s Location Awareness is reportedly the first personnel safety technology powered by the WirelessHART infrastructure, a secure standard adopted in tens of thousands of plants and facilities worldwide. It can be installed in days, compared to weeks for existing systems, and costs less than half of traditional, existing alternatives, according to Emerson.
The Location Awareness system combines a new software application in Emerson’s Plantweb Insight suite with gateways, access points, location anchors and personnel tags certified for hazardous conditions. The software includes a safety-mustering feature that shows which employees have or have not checked in to their muster points during an emergency, man-down alerts that allow personnel in dangerous situations to initiate an alert for emergency response teams and a geofencing feature that designates perimeters around areas and sends an alert if and when that perimeter is crossed.
Location Awareness will be available in July 2019.