5 Ways GPS Can Improve Trenching & Excavation Safety in 2020

by user
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Trenching & excavation work is one of the most dangerous jobs you could do on a construction site. Every year thousands of workers are seriously hurt by cave-ins, falls, electrocutions, and heavy equipment accidents while performing this kind of work—which is why OSHA consistently lists trenching & excavation safety as part of its “2 big areas of focus.”

But besides training and policy enforcement around using the right protective systems, what else can your company do to protect workers in the trenches? In this post, we explore the different ways your company could use cutting edge GPS products to do just that.

History of Using GPS to Increase Safety in Construction

Using GPS to improve safety on jobsites isn’t a new concept. Companies like Caterpillar have added built-in GPS sensors to excavators in the past, giving operators more control over the depth of their dig. This means fewer people working inside the trench to judge accuracy or depth.

Then there’re companies like Human Condition Safety, who’ve created wearables that use Ultra-wideband location chips to track the ergonomic positions of workers in the field, preventing injuries that come from workers using improper lifting techniques. And there’s Triax Technology, which uses a mesh network of wearables to alert managers if a worker has fallen on the job.

But while these solutions do improve onsite safety, they also require lots of infrastructure such as beacons and wifi to work, making them very costly to deploy. They also are difficult to customize and their feature sets don’t seem to focus on preventing the most common trench related accidents.

Most interestingly, there’s a group of researchers that over the last few years have been testing GPS technology and its ability to increase a worker’s spatial awareness as a means of preventing common jobsite injuries. In 2017, researchers from the University of Idaho saw some success using GPS wearables with dynamic geofencing by tagging dump trucks and workers. They later followed this research with a series of papers showing how this system of of GPS wearables + dynamic geofences could work in related industries such as Logging, and how the accuracy of alerts can be improved with better receivers.

Location-sharing options by required bandwidth from least intensive to most intensive

However, researchers also theorized that the current out-of-the-box options were either too expensive or too inaccurate to be widely adopted. The most accurate GPS chips were less expensive than using UBW or mesh networks, but still costs thousands of dollars per device; conversely, the recreational-grade receivers researchers used in their experiments were cost-effective but produced so many false alerts that researchers believed workers would tune them out.

But the GPS chip technology has improved a lot within the past year.

5 Types of Accidents Next-Gen Geofencing Could Prevent

Now, with the right software, companies are able to get centimeter-level accuracy without deploying hundreds of beacons or spending thousands of dollars on each wearable. So as producers of geofencing software ourselves, we thought it’d be interesting to take a look at what kind of ways this technology can be used to protect those in the trenches.

NOTE: If you work in construction and are interested in any of the below use cases, please contact us at cleo.kirkland@zonetap.com to learn more about our pilot program.

1. Preventing Cave-ins Caused by Spoil Pile Slides

Marko Kaar, Excavation & Trenching Safety

What’s the Problem?

When soil is piled too close to the edge of a trench, it can cause the walls of the trench to cave in and bury the worker, which is known as a “Spoil Pile Slide.” This is the most common type of cave-in that can occur on a jobsite.