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PACHOM® patents pending© 2016 SwissTip S.A.

Novel Construction Plenary Session

31March 2016,Geneva

An innovative multi-technologyanti-collision detection system!

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Number of fatal accidents at work/number of accidents worldwide by zone.

The mining industry employs approximately 1 percent of world labour, yet it is responsible for 5 percent of fatal accidents at work (at least 15,000 per year, i.e. over 40 every day).

In the building sector, there are at least 60,000 fatal accidents on work sites every year. Hundreds of thousands more suffer serious injuries and health problems. In fact, these estimates are actually below the real figures. In many countries, less than 20% of accidents causing physical injury are declared.

Middle-Eastern Crescent

Latin America, the Caribbean

Sub-Saharan Africa

Other Asia and islands

China

India

Formerly socialist economies

Established market economies

Number of fatal accidents at work/number of accidents worldwide by zone.

Studies by INRS as well as many other studies carried out throughout the world have been based on the serious problem of accidents due to various collision risks between mobile construction equipment (including dump trucks of all sizes) and pedestrian workers.

From toxicological hazards to physical and psychological well-being, the INRS conducts study and research programmes to improve the health and safety of men and women at work.It also determines future risk prevention needs by evaluating the measures and programmeadopted.

The INRS is a non-profit organisation, subject to State financial supervision, and created in 1947 under the auspices of the CNAMTS. It was originally named Institut National de Sécurité (INS, National safety institute) and took on its current name, Institut National de Recherche et de Sécurité (INRS, National research and safety institute), in 1968.

PACHOM® patents pending© 2016 SwissTip S.A.

PACHOM Prévention anticollision Homme MachineUBEP Unité de Balisage Electronique PachomUPI Unité Pachom IndividuelleUCP Unité de Contrôle Pachom

Note that a single accident causing the death of one worker, in addition to the loss of life proves very expensive for the company owner. From the outset, compensation paid to families and immediate action cost on average half a million Euros (covered by insurance, the company owner and sometimes partly by the state). In Europe, worksites are brought to a complete standstill for the duration of the inquiry resulting in enormous production losses and causing work delays. Whether or not work is stopped, elsewhere in the world the psychological trauma caused to other workers and the damage caused by the accident have devastating effects on the progress of work. These accidents also contribute to tension amongst workers and the employer.

The amount of money lost as a result of a single accident is much greater, far greater than the cost of installing a PACHOM prevention system. Installing accident prevention systems improves the company’s image, demonstrating that it has a responsible attitude towards its workers and also allows it to meet increasingly strict government standards. Even in Asia, where a lot of the countries have safety standards which are a lot less strict than in Europe, companies working on work sites are greatly affected by the negative repercussions of each accident. It is for this reason that demand for prevention solutions is so great and even more so when these solutions are adapted to limit the impact on operations (unnecessary warnings and interruptions to work, false alarms).

With reference to the latest report by INRS (2015) on the subject, the following points are worth emphasizing:

1) Accidents do not always occur between machines and pedestrian workers, damage to property also arises from collisions between machines, and even more importantly, many cases of injury and death are due to accidents occurring between machines (for example, two cranes which collide and fall on pedestrian workers below). The collision prevention system must therefore take into account pedestrian workers, and other machines but also potentially hazardous situations.

2) Risk of accident affects all building and construction sites, but also heavy industry, logistics (including accidents caused by pallet trucks), ports, railways, anywhere where machines and workers are found together on the same site. To prevent unnecessary interruptions to operations and false alarms and to most effectively protect against the real risk of accident, any solution chosen must be able to adapt to the real circumstances that each machine and environment presents (mines, roadworks, quarries, ports – containers, etc.).

3)The physical environment must be considered for detecting collision risk. The biggest obstacles to detection and visibility encountered by various detection technologies are: rain, snow, ice, condensation, dust, mud, the nature of airborne particles, full sunlight, lack of light/darkness, wind (which affects ultrasound over distance), workers’ clothes (which absorb heat, cold, light, ultra-sound).

4)The prevention system must warn the operator. Better still, when permitted by regulations and when necessary, the prevention system must also be able to interface with the machine in order to intervene instantaneously and directly. For example, the new European standard for industrial drills which requires that the motor of the drill automatically runs at idle at the approach of a repair technician (or when the door of a safety cage is opened). Another example, stopping the engine of a pallet truck when it gets too close and too quickly to an excavation (such as the foundations of a new building).

5)Workers who can be warned directly can save their own lives. In addition to warning the operator/driver, if it is possible to warn the worker, fractions of precious seconds can be saved, giving the person in danger a chance to save his own life.

6)To be effective, an alarm must be unambiguous and provoke an immediate reaction, a survival instinct to limit reaction delays.

7)To prevent false alarms and unnecessary interruptions to operations, accident risk detection must go further than simply detecting another person or machine. The detection zone must be controlled and other conditions must be included in the accident risk calculation process (for example, motor on or off, clutch in reverse position for risks behind the machine or truck, detection of a fall, the type of alert required to adapt reactions (warning or alarm), etc. The prevention system must therefore incorporate the technologies required to take into account real risk factors and the alert adapted to the circumstances of the risk (for example, alarms for risk of a lorry reversing into a worker, slowing down plus flashing light without alarm when approaching a drill).

PACHOM is a multi-technology anti-collision detection system

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