ES1291283U9 - PORTABLE DEVICE FOR ACTION IN EMERGENCY SITUATIONS - Google Patents

Description

DESCRIPTION

Portable device for action in emergency situations

TECHNICAL SECTOR

This invention refers to the development of a portable device for action against emergency situations based on the application of ultra-wide band (UWB) pulses within the collective and individual security sector against emergency situations in open and closed spaces. where the need is required to: Ensure the complete evacuation of all personnel and, if this is not the case, have precisely located within the facilities those who have not been able to reach the exit or meeting point; activate emergency notifications manually or automatically by sensing the heart rate; Activate collective or personal warnings in certain situations of potential risk for people.

STATE OF THE ART

Currently, emergency action protocols try to offer a general response mechanism in case of fire, bomb warning and accident or illness with the aim of organizing an eventual evacuation of all personnel present in both open and closed facilities. The identification of the presence of these personnel inside the facilities is a mandatory requirement, contemplated in the self-protection protocols, which starts from the moment they enter the premises until they leave. Currently, each company uses different options to ensure this identification, such as: Manual registration of entries and exits through signature sheets; personal magnetic stripe cards that are passed through a reader where these entries and exits are recorded; biometric control systems that associate personnel to some of their physical characteristics such as fingerprints, facial patterns, retinas or the palm of the hand; proximity cards based on radio frequency identification (passive RFID). All these options only allow us to know who is at the meeting point and who is missing, thus delaying the rescue time of the emergency team and increasing the risk of accident for trapped or injured people.

Experience shows us that the degree of application of the current state of the art differs enormously from one company to another. In most of the industrial facilities in which we have worked, the evacuation and emergency action protocols remain the same since the approval of the latest regulations on occupational risk prevention or the certification of complementary safety standards, that is, for more than 15 years in most countries.

Technological advances, except in some companies, have not resulted in a renovation of the facilities or in an adaptation of their protocols to adapt them to the new security needs, in order to protect as much as possible the integrity of the group of people who For various reasons, they have to be inside facilities that, due to their nature, must minimize the risk of an accident.

In many industrial centers we find that the control protocol for the presence of external personnel in a facility, suppliers or subcontractors consists of an identification sticker, a magnetic card or a manual record in a notebook where each operator writes down their name, DNI, time of entry , date and signature. In the best of cases, its entry is recorded in a computer system where the same data is recorded, in addition to the company or subcontractor that develops the project. For the identification of own personnel, passive radio frequency identification tags are usually used.

This fact, which surely complies with current regulations and/or the corresponding safety standards, can generate and generates situations that clearly compromise the risk in situations of emergency declaration or undetected work accident, either due to an error in the when registering a worker or due to the dilation of action times by having to verify the presence of all the personnel at the established meeting points.

This risk is triggered by maintenance stops, where in one day a large number of operators from different contracts can be grouped at different levels, carrying out activities of all kinds in a frenetic manner, overlapping spaces and with a goal of completion in a set time. .

Some technological solutions based on real-time location systems (RTLS) have tried to provide a more efficient solution to these emergency situations. introducing the possibility of instantly identifying the number of people trapped or injured, as well as locating them spatially. The current use of the different real-time location systems is subject to certain restrictions imposed both by the development of each of the technologies involved, and by their degree of adaptability to work environments with a certain degree of radioelectric saturation. The necessary security requirements in these facilities also require developments and inventions that maximize the efficiency of these technologies and allow their standardization to any type of environment. The present invention tries to take advantage of one of those technologies based on ultra-wideband signals to adapt it to industrial environments.

DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION

The present invention consists of a device to provide a safe response that allows, not only to register personnel entrances and exits or to obtain metrics of their positioning in real time inside the facilities, but also to transmit individual warnings of risk or evacuation to workers, and also have the possibility of activating, by the worker, accident warnings manually or automatically through biometric sensors integrated in the emitting label they carry.

For this purpose we have relied on ultra-broadband technology as a real-time location system. Its main advantage is that ultra-broadband transmitters consume less energy than the rest of the radio frequency tags, operating in a wide area of the radio spectrum; In addition, ultra-wide band transmissions allow us to use them simultaneously in the same environments as other radio frequency receivers without suffering interference, even if they have the same frequency band, because the power spectral density of their signals is below noise. background thermal. Also, the short duration pulses generated by ultra-wideband emitter tags are easy to filter, allowing us to determine which signals are correct and which are created by reflections from the environment. At the same time, these signals easily pass through most non-metallic surfaces allowing centimeter positioning accuracies to be achieved with long distances between the tag and its closest corresponding signal reader.

Based on all these characteristics we have developed an adaptation of the ultra-wideband transceiver in order to reduce assistance times in case of emergency, as well as being able to prevent risk situations in those complex and densely saturated industrial installations with receptors for electromagnetic pulses or background radio noise, such as thermal power plants, food and material processing industries, etc.

For the development of this device, fixed ultra-broadband pulse receivers/transmitters will be sized so that their signal covers all the spaces and levels of the work areas. Its function will be twofold:

On the one hand, collect location data by means of spatial coordinates and/or risk or emergency warnings emitted by the mobile transceivers fixed to the operators and send them to a server for processing by a computer program with a graphical interface where a map will be represented three-dimensional view of the facilities with the positions of all personnel identified by a unique numerical code for each worker. A digit will be added to each of these codes that will indicate the level defined in height in which it is located, for example "p", as well as a fixed numerical sequence related to a color, for example "cccc". The result will be to have the workers anonymously identified by means of a fixed sequence per individual, a fixed sequence per belonging group (external contractor 1, company employees, visitors, etc.) and a variable digit depending on the plant level. This identification can be completed by associating codes to certain figures instead of points that visually represent functions or positions.

On the other hand, send individual or collective evacuation, emergency or risk warning signals both from the control room and automatically for previously defined risk situations.

In order for this procedure to be carried out, we have developed a device that integrates an ultra-wide band transceiver, a pulse sensor that releases radiofrequency signals for a fixed period, two light indicators, a sunken panic button to avoid involuntary activation activated by a projection present on the belt, a buzzer and a vibrating mechanism.

Its operation would be based on the different security incidents that could occur: In the event of an evacuation, all the personnel present in the facilities would be sent a warning signal to their device that would activate an indicator light of a preset color for that incident as well as a buzzer and vibrating mechanism. In the case of violation of incompatible work spaces between groups of operators, an acoustic, vibrating or light warning defined in each of the devices would be activated, in addition to a warning to the mobile terminal of the operations manager and to the control center. In the event that operators are working below levels where other maintenance activities or certain risk operations involving falling objects or tools are carried out, a defined acoustic, vibrating or light warning would be activated in each of the devices in addition to a notice to the mobile terminal of the person in charge of operations and to the control center. In the event of an accident, the operator himself could press the panic button on his device, sending a signal to the control center or the person in charge of operations. In the event of a mismatch in the pulse or a non-existent pulse, the device itself would activate a previously defined rhythmic pattern of signals, transmitted to the terminals of the people designated to attend to this fact.

Another advantage of this procedure is being able to monitor in real time the complete evacuation of personnel from a facility, as well as optimizing response times through evacuation drills.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

Fig 1: Represents a way of attaching the portable device, in this case a bracelet type to be attached to the operator's wrist. 1. Portable device antenna. 2. Highlight to activate panic button.

Fig 2: Components of the portable device. 1. Sunken emergency or anti-panic button that activates an accident or serious emergency warning signal in the facilities. 2. Light indicators each of a different color. 3. Ultra-wideband pulse transmitter/receiver. 4. Pulse sensor, buzzer and vibrating mechanism.

DESCRIPTION REGARDING AN EMBODIMENT MODE

On the first day of entering the industry or the workplace, each worker will be given their portable device (Fig. 2) integrated into a bracelet (Fig. 1) that will already have a permanent numerical code assigned until the day of their termination of employment or completion of contracted work in the case of external personnel. Anonymously and in order to preserve privacy data, this coding will be associated with your identification data. information in a secure way, including in the telematic entry/exit register the data referring to your name, ID number, company to which you belong and functions that you are going to carry out. The person in charge of operations in coordination with the control center will only be able to have the individual code, the name of the company and the functions to be carried out in order to precede the programming of the required groups, the violations of spaces that entail risk or the restrictions of rooms to which who are banned from entering.

In a possible way of programming the device, if during the course of the working day, any worker or workers detected a serious incident that they understood to be a reason for eviction from the workplace, they would activate the panic button (Fig. 2. 1) by sending thus a warning signal to the head of operations, head of emergencies and the control center with the exact location where the incident was observed, allowing a quick investigation in order to see if the evacuation of the center proceeds. If appropriate, the evacuation siren of the center will be activated so that all the personnel can go to the meeting points, at the same time the workers will be activated an indicator light (Fig. 2. 2) associated with this action in addition to the vibrating mechanism (Fig. 2. 4).

In another embodiment, when the panic button is activated by an operator in case of detecting an incident according to established criteria, a signal automatically reaches all the people who carry the device, and those people when they see that it is the evacuation signal, automatically, all personnel proceed to the evacuation.

From the control center it will be possible to monitor this evacuation, as well as coordinate with the intervention team the warnings activated by those personnel who may have been trapped or injured without the ability to evacuate. At the same time, you will be able to evaluate the vital state of these workers through the heart rate monitor integrated in the central part of the same plate where the vibrating mechanism of the bracelet is housed (Fig. 2. 4), which in case of exceeding certain thresholds a different signal sequence will be activated automatically, thus allowing the intervention team to prioritize attention.

In the case of actions that may compromise the risk of workers, such as the violation of spaces due to the development of incompatible operations that affect safety or the work of teams or workers located at different levels and the same vertical, the software will process the location data by sending a sound warning signal and so that they can be aware of these risk situations, being responsible for operations together with the head of emergencies who will determine the possibility of continuing the activity or indicate to the control center which teams must stop their work to meet in the meeting room, in this case, these teams will be notified by means of a signal that will activate the second of the light indicators with a color established for those situations

Claims (1)

1. Portable device for action in emergency work situations characterized in that it is a geolocated device and is made up of: - an ultra-wide band signal transmitter/receiver and its signal receiving antenna, - an arterial pulse sensor that releases radiofrequency signals for a fixed period, - light indicators for warning established, - a sunken panic button that sends short period warning signals and protrudes on the bracelet to activate it, - an acoustic indicator and - a vibrating mechanism that is activated by receiving established signal patterns.