5 Ways Real Time Incident Reporting Protects Safety

In many organisations and situations, incident reporting is manual and involves paperwork, phone calls, emails and face to face communication. When the process is cumbersome, incidents, near misses and hazards occur every day but are unreported. This lack of real time incident reporting introduces business risks of further injury or damage to people or property.

Implementing a real-time digital incident reporting solution allows the people who experience the incident to report it in the moment it occurs. Using a digital solution on a connected device, users can report location details, provide photos of property damage, personal injury details and contact details of parties involved. Depending on the severity of the event, a digital solution can notify authorities immediately, increasing the safety of the community and protecting infrastructure.

Some common incident report types include:

Injury to employee or contractor
Quality control
Liability report
Property damage
Security incident
Environmental incident
Lost time injury
First aid treatment
Death or serious incident

There are five situations where real-time reporting of incidents can dramatically improve safety and protect assets.

1. IoT in manufacturing

There is an increasing need for centralised monitoring and predictive maintenance of manufacturing infrastructure. Agile production, operational efficiency and control as well as growing regulatory compliances is driving the development of advanced analytics and IoT in manufacturing.

Gas detection sensors and air flow and ventilation monitoring sensors can monitor the levels of toxic and flammable gas in an environment and alert workers and authorities. This ensures that airflow and ventilation are kept to optimal levels.

IoT, AI and connected devices can supply and analyse real-time data instantly, and send warnings to individual miners, no matter where they are located.

2. Traffic accidents and congestion

Traffic accidents and congestion are an issue in most countries around the world. Smart traffic management includes streetlights, smart parking sensors and smart accident assistance amongst other things.

Traffic Lights

Traffic lights that use real-time data feeds can smooth traffic load. Sensors mounted at strategic places can use IoT technology to gather data about high traffic junctions and areas and divert vehicles from these places. Big data can analyse this information further and determine alternative routes, as well as better traffic signalling to ease congestion.

3. Traffic hazards

IoT road sensors can provide real-time data from roads to help divert the flow of traffic away from areas of hazard. Road sensors can be embedded under the roads. They effectively measure changes in temperature, traffic volume and humidity, among other weather and traffic constraints. Servers collect data from road sensors, providing authorities with real-time information about traffic and road conditions in the IoT-equipped regions. Insights can help optimise maintenance resources and equipment, as well as predict and alert authorities to possible hazards and accidents.

4. Environmental spills

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Air and Water Monitoring was established to provide a comprehensive report card of ecological resources and to detect trends in the condition of those resources. The EPA employs biosensors and routinely monitors both water and air in urban and rural areas. The potential for biosensor technology for environmental monitoring is huge and the impact is far-reaching.

Digital platforms now offer speed, efficiency and cost savings to environmental compliance, investigations and operational planning. Authorities can access forecasted, current and historical environmental information relevant to their needs on any connected device. Authorities can assess short-term risks and track nuisance complaints at your fingertips, for a smarter approach to environmental management.

5. Railways

Rail safety applications enable users to report incidents on railway accidents and incidents in real-time, improving response time, public safety and notifying authorities of potential hazards. The information stored in the database can:

provide feedback promptly to authorities
inform safety initiatives
compile incident statistics
assess risks
manage public safety
protect rail infrastructure

Collecting and distributing information about railway incidents enables permanent monitoring of railway safety, benchmarking and analysis of trends and follow up actions.

Real-time incident reporting protects users, workers, the general public, workplaces, infrastructure and property. Advances in technology such as IoT link machines, infrastructure, users and the environment to sensors. The sensors provide data to monitoring systems, which trigger notifications and generate reports. Digital real-time incident reporting notifies authorities, prompting them to respond immediately, limiting damage to people and property.

No matter the size of your business, having a digital incident management system can promote safety. Mobiddiction builds and manages real-time incident reporting for: