Emerson Launches New Location Awareness System to Protect Employees, Enhance Industrial Safety
October 4, 2018
Emerson today announced the launch of Location Awareness, a new offering in its Plantweb™ digital ecosystem that advances industrial safety to protect employees at refineries, chemical plants and oil and gas platforms. By leveraging the secure industrial wireless infrastructure, this personnel location system offers industrial companies an enhanced option to protect their most important asset – workers.
Emerson’s Location Awareness technology could help reduce more than 70 percent of common personnel-recordable incidents. Used for safety mustering and man-down events, Location Awareness gives managers a snapshot of employee locations through rechargeable wearable tags. In an emergency, when every second counts, managers can quickly account for employees’ locations in the plant or facility and act to ensure safety.
“Safety is one of Emerson’s core values, and this latest technology advancement will help us bring new levels of safety to manufacturing workers across the globe,” said Lal Karsanbhai, executive president of Emerson Automation Solutions. “We know that installation complexity has been a major roadblock to sites considering similar solutions. With its fast, simple installation, Location Awareness is making it easier than ever before to implement a best-in-class safety system to protect employees.”
With scalable features, Emerson’s Location Awareness is 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 just days, compared to weeks for existing systems, and costs less than half of traditional, existing alternatives.
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. For more information, please visit www.Emerson.com/LocationAwareness
