Wearable system tracks workers safely inside and outside buildings
Location-Based Safety Management with Wearable Seamless Indoor-Outdoor Positioning
Robotics
Summary
Tracking workers accurately both indoors and outdoors is important for safety, but can be difficult because GPS doesn't work well indoors and many indoor systems are expensive or hard to set up. The authors developed a wearable device that combines GPS, motion sensors, and other data, sending some information to the cloud for better location estimates. This system tracks workers in real time with good accuracy both inside and outside buildings while saving battery life. Their experiments showed the approach can provide reliable and continuous worker location to help manage safety on industrial sites.
What this means in practice
- •For industrial safety teams: Provide continuous, accurate location tracking of workers indoors and outdoors to improve real-time safety monitoring and incident response.
- •For construction site managers: Use seamless worker location data to control site access based on geofencing and analyze productivity alongside safety.
Authors
Anh-Van Vu, Seungwoo Chae, Changmin Sung, Van-Tuan Nguyen, Dongsoo Han
Abstract
Reliable worker localization is essential for real-time industrial safety management, but seamless outdoor-indoor positioning remains challenging. GNSS performs well outdoors yet degrades near buildings and fails indoors, while many indoor systems require costly infrastructure or extensive calibration. This paper presents a practical safety-oriented positioning system that uses resource-constrained wearable tags and a device-cloud split architecture for continuous outdoor-indoor worker tracking. The tag integrates GNSS, IMU, barometric sensing, LTE Cat-M communication, and performs lightweight sensor fusion, while the cloud server executes map-aware fusion for continuous tracking. Developed as an operational platform, the system also includes a database, a map tool, and a dashboard that provide real-time monitoring, geofencing-based access alerts, and safety and productivity analysis. Experiments with multiple participants, each walking an approximately 1400 m outdoor-indoor route, using LTE Cat-M communication, achieve mean errors of 1.32 m indoors and 3.30 m outdoors, while maintaining low positioning latency and efficient power consumption. These results demonstrate the feasibility of wearable-based seamless positioning for scalable real-time safety management.