Category: IOT

Slicing through waves a jumbo ship is moving ahead full sail to the dock. People can’t take the eyes off of the ship waiting for the next captain’s move with bated breath. Is he a newbie? Did something go wrong? Are we looking at the reason for today’s overtime? Anyway, the overspeeding ship starts to turn clumsily ignoring port operator’s radio distorted screams and shouts, as inertia steers the ship and a big wave pounds on the mooring — kaboom! The ship kisses the concrete shore. The next thing you see is a loading metal crane gently hugging the ship.

All this could have been avoided, should a system similar to car parking sensors alerting the driver about obstacles – curb or garage walls – be installed on vessels to do the same job for the skipper. A video recorder would be useful for documenting all events as well, if scaled proportionally, of course, to the size of large ships and moorings. In fact, all ships have such equipment to video ships approaching the shore and mooring, but this is barely enough. What we really need here is the next level mooring assistant familiar with all marine peculiarities, since natural forces influence sea travel and mooring greatly, unlike ordinary parking.

The ship always hits the mooring. It is just possible that the mooring perfectly maintains and serves ten ships in a row, but can’t survive the eleventh and falls apart, thus triggering a series of unfortunate events and causing port to lose money.

• Firstly, a mooring costs a lot. If pipes, port facilities, and loading cranes are damaged in an accident, costs grow proportionally.
• Secondly, every ship is on a tight schedule, so it has a narrow window for docking – 30 hours, for example. If a port manages to maintain and serve a ship within the deadline or earlier (25 hours, for example), it receives a bonus from a shipowner. Delays may occur as well, which means that the port owes a penalty. A broken mooring causes a sea of changes in the port’s schedule, and service delays become inevitable.
• Thirdly, the port has to prove to the insurance company that it is not guilty of messing everything up. How to prove it? Captains do not feel like providing records from their ship systems. In a worst-case scenario, the port loses more money paying for the damage.

Thus appeared MOORiNET, a solution for vessel mooring and berthing designed to prevent any massive accidents involving ports or moored ships. MOORiNET system warns about undesirable ship movement and possible collisions to prevent ship or dock damage, oil hose or loading arms breaking, spread of hazardous and noxious substances. Remember those car parking sensors? MOORiNET is its big brother: a marine garage-scale mooring sensor keeping it safe from crazy skippers. How do you like that, Elon Musk?

Port control over vessel maneuvers

MOORiNET monitors where and how the ship is going and helps it to dock safely. The sensors detect various weather conditions and transmit the data to the port operator who supervises mooring rules. Weather sensors measure wind, wave, and visibility. A meteorological station monitors the outside temperature, atmospheric pressure, and the sea surface height. When a ship approaches, laser rangefinders and surveillance cameras automatically start monitoring the bow and stern using machine vision. The ship is captured from 300 meters, and the closer the ship gets, the more accurate the data are. The berth has a system that measures the impact during the mooring.

Therefore, an operator enjoys full port visibility. The ship’s speed is monitored as well in real time and displayed at the operator’s dashboard. Each vessel is highlighted with a color representing speed safety level range. In the case of any violations, the operator proactively warns the ship to take the situation under control. Should an accident happen, all sensor data records will be available to help investigate, whether a huge wave caused an accident or if the ship was violating mooring rules and overspeeding.

Loading accidents

There is a rule, and the rule says: Once the ship docks, the port is responsible for whatever happens to it then. Now, picture this: a moored ship is being loaded with oil. The vessel gets heavier with each new ton, and all this pressure goes down on the mooring… To keep the mooring from being depressed, load binders are used. These are automatically controlled metal devices to tighten chains holding the ship’s bow and stern fixed. Many ports shut them off, as they can loosen or tighten the ship too much. Usually, somebody controls load binders using nothing but natural intuition and experience. Sadly, either human errors caused accidents or the perfect storm occurred with all its wind, fog, sand in the face, the sun hurting the eyes, and heavy snowing in the northern countries. Chains break apart, the oil hose follows, and the hazardous chemical spills on the sea surface. Here is when oil spill detection solutions come in handy.

MOORiNET can be integrated with a load binders system. The algorithm uses video analytics and laser rangefinders to detect a slightest movement of the ship and automatically alert a person responsible, so that this person either loosens or tightens the chain. The same applies to the oil supply system.

Harbor pilot helper

There is a MOORiNET version designed specifically for harbor pilots. An Android app gives a pilot all necessary information such as the speed at the ship’s bow and stern and the weather. The app connects to the ship’s system via a connector and synchronizes data with the MOORiNET at the mooring, thus providing the port and the ship with consistent information for better safety.

Read more:

• Innovative medical kiosk for three-minute health check
• Industry 4.0 to reduce the number of accidents at oil and gas facilities

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Everyone at work is entitled to be provided with an environment where risks of health and safety are professionally controlled. Employers carry primary responsibility for safe and accident-free working sites. 

What are the key factors that have a direct impact on the number of accidents, people’s injuries, incurring unplanned costs and breaching projects’ timelines?

This list comprises but not limited to: 

• Processes inefficiency 
• Lack of visibility of specific areas in the processes and working sites 
• Human factors
• Inefficiency in security and safety guidelines
• Employees performance 

NNTC’s Digital Worker is an IoT and video analytics-based platform that addresses these critical factors providing all required insights and allows to build a fully efficient, accident free industrial or construction site as well as eliminates breaches of projects’ scopes and timelines.

Here is why:

Learn how Digital Worker helps prevent workplace accidents and safety violations.

A mess on a construction site is quite a common thing and can be tolerated to some extent if it is an organized mess. However, when this mess creeps into core processes, a construction site turns into a hurrah’s nest, and a developer faces risk of large penalties, downtime, and even death toll. In this blog, we’ll tell you how CROC, our strategic partner, implemented a face recognition system on a construction site.

One fine, sunny day, when the site was buzzing with activity and dozens of workers were moving around cheerful and positive, a former workman penetrated the site. He passed through a checkpoint, greeted a guard who knew him well (but did not know that he had been fired already), entered the territory, and went to his friends. Half an hour later, a fire was burning, with the workers drinking tea, resting, and enjoying their lives.

The problem was that they made the fire near two gas cylinders, one of which suddenly exploded. Neither warning nor alert. Just exploded, and that’s it! Fortunately, people were just shocked, not injured, but a police came to the site the same day and initiated an inspection, which revealed some unpleasant facts for a contractor:

• Many workers used forged documents. In other words, one family member obtained necessary documents, got hired at the construction site, and then his brother went for work instead of him.
• For each worker using forged documents, a fine of $7,600 or even more may be imposed, and the construction process may be suspended for 14 – 90 days with almost catastrophic consequences for a general contractor and customer.

That is why the contractor asked CROC for help.

How to solve a problem?

Initially, the construction site was equipped with just run-of-the-mill employee recognition systems:

• Palm vein identification, which performs poorly even in clean offices if people eat some greasy food there. After eating, this vein pattern changes causing recognition errors.
• Iris identification, which is more expensive and time consuming. It is hardly the best option when every morning buses arrive at a construction site and some 600 workers have to pass the checkpoint within one hour, from 7 to 8 a.m. It’s as slow as a snail!

Therefore, it was the time to try video analytics.

Each turnstile is equipped with two cameras: one aimed at incoming people, and the other, at outgoing.

There is a small cooled server room on site, having a rack with two servers and a switch. The first server receives video stream from cameras and identifies frames containing faces and being of the best quality. The second server receives these “clear” frames with faces and runs a recognition algorithm to find a match in a database.

If a frame contains only one face and this person is authorized to pass through, then the turnstile opens. Otherwise, a guard is alerted.

No Internet connection is needed for the system, just a copper cabling on site. However, if connected, the system allows for continuous monitoring, email reports, and remote second line support for operators.

The system runs perfectly in typical situations:

• Using a pass card of another person to enter — an alerted guard stops a trespasser and investigates the incident.
• A former employee attempts to enter the site — a guard does not let him in.
• An employee attempts to enter the site in wrong time — a guard asks the employee to get a pass card at an access control office and then come back to the checkpoint.

In addition, every evening, executives get a report on how many people were scheduled for work and how many arrived actually. It is very important since contractor’s favorite trick is to schedule 50 workers, provide only 30, and then report on 50.

Moreover, this information — like 600 people scheduled, only 450 arrived — shows if a project is running out of time already. And you see it right now, but not a week or month later.

Outcome

Morning queues have almost disappeared. Instead, it takes one hour for two turnstiles to let 700 people in, even including guard intervention cases. The customer enjoys reports on the actual number of people arrived at the construction site, which was a sad news for some of the contractors. Neither a $7,600 penalty nor work suspension for 14 – 90 days is pending now, with the system itself costing less than this penalty.

NNTC actively partners with CROC and implements face recognition solutions in GCC countries. If you are interested in this technology, feel free to contact our consultants.

Any hazardous occupation calls for continuous health checks to make sure that manufacturing workers, bus drivers and pilots are medically fit to deal with their jobs, as well as nuclear operators are clean and sober before the shift. This job list can be continued.

Many plants make medical examinations a must for rank-and-file employees, too many for one physician to conduct but not so thorough as for pilots or nuclear operators. Such a health check includes measuring blood pressure, heart rate, temperature, blood oxygenation, and basic reflexes. Some local regulations prohibit robots from examining these health indicators, some do allow it, but still require a medical professional to approve the results. Thus, humans remain in change, but may enjoy great automation benefits.

Medical kiosk is a comprehensive solution to measure all relevant indicators allowing workers to undergo every morning’s medical examination in just three minutes.

What is a medical kiosk? It is a Linux machine with a variety of medical sensors and the software to identify patients by a card, fingerprint, face or eye, run examinations, enter the results into a database, and even print them out. The database can either be inside the kiosk or stored in the company’s HR system or on another external server. 

Basic configuration consists of a case, vandal-proof touch screen (16 mm glass), printer, and camera for a doctor to supervise the examination or detect patient change after authentication. The default sensors measure heart rate, blood oxygenation by transillumination, blood pressure (a cuff), and alcohol intoxication. The advanced configuration provides additionally a pupillometer, touch-free thermometer, scales and any sensors of choice, like glucose meter or contact thermometer, etc.

Default sensors

The breathalyzer is a device consisting of an ethanol (or rather alcoholic fumes) sensor connected to the access control system. If a person is OK, the turnstile opens. If alcohol intoxication is detected, then security is notified and the turnstile remains closed.

Such kiosk at the entry turnstiles doesn’t substitute medical personnel but significantly reduces their workload and minimizes human factor impact on result accuracy.

Additional sensors

Thermal imaging cameras are not the news, so we decided to adapt them for touch-free thermometers that use the forehead to take a temperature. The point sensor is located right above a breathalyzer. Our test subject was savvy enough to quickly find a way of cheating the system by rubbing the forehead before examination, with the terminal immediately triggering an alarm and offering to call an ambulance, a quarantine control and neutralizing teams.

A pupillometer measures pupil response time: a flash – and the count begins. The response time helps determine nervous system condition, particularly nervous exaltation or slowness, which are usually caused by diseases, alcohol, drugs, medication, fatigue, sleepiness or mental disorders.

Summary

Full health check session takes three minutes (the more sensors, the longer it takes).

Doctors concur that the terminal can quickly identify hypertensive crisis with potential to develop into myocardial infarction or stroke, tachycardia (increased pulse rate) or bradycardia (decreased pulse rate), fever caused by acute infection, ARVI, influenza, and alcohol intoxication (a usual suspect for any plant).

Generally, this kiosk is a kind of a construction set that you can turn into a full-fledged and handy medical tool of choice. You can even choose the case.

Medical terminals are used for daily staff checks before shifts. The three-step employee identification process includes an individual USB key reading, photo recognition, and fingerprint scanning, while the comprehensive medical examination consists of blood pressure and heart rate measurement, and respiratory alcohol level testing.

The customer confirmed that daily pre-shift health checks via medical terminals help to reduce industrial injury and emergency risks, and improve staff behavior.