Tata Communications Aims To Combine Latest Advances in Wearables And IoT To Provide Employers The Ability To Protect Their Most Valuable Assets Employees

We spoke to Rajiv Desai – Product Head (Safety) IoT India, Tata Communications to understand their focus areas for the Indian safety market, their, latest range of devices to ensure worker safety in treacherous working environs, how they leverage technologies behind IoT to ensure work safety, new safety products and solutions that they plan to launch in India in the near future and his views on UBM’s OSH India show and the role played by it in connecting the OSH community on one platform.

Interviewed by Adeesh Sharma

1. Please tell us about your focus areas for the Indian safety market?

Tata Communications IoT BU is focussed on human safety  - whether it is employees or factory-floor workers. We aim to combine the latest advances in the domains of wearables and IoT to provide employers the ability to protect their most valuable assets- their employees, in a variety of ways such as a panic button in case of an emergency to initiate help and rescue in real-time, an ID-card based tracker to accurately determine the location of a worker inside a factory as well as tracking in real-time the health and safety of factory-workers using the world’s first safety watch to track heart-rate, skin-temperature, fall and immobility, SoS as well as location.

2. Please tell us about your latest range of devices to ensure worker safety in treacherous working environs.

We currently have the following range:

·         Safety Watch /Wearable

·         ID-Card Tracker

·         Panic Button

3. How do you leverage the technologies behind IoT to ensure work safety?

IoT is witnessing rapid growth as a technology-stack globally. The key aspects relevant to safety are reliability of the solution, range and scale of devices, power consumption and analytics to arrive at meaningful insights.

Reliability – The components which make an IoT solution possible- devices, the radio communication (LoRA, NB-IOT etc.), IoT platforms and web applications are being made robust and resilient ensuring accurate performance even in harsh environments such as factories. This ensures that use of IoT in safety applications are increasingly relevant due to extensive testing as well as redundancies being built at various stages of the solution to ensure no critical alert is ever missed

Devices – Devices such as wearables, trackers and panic buttons have witnessed dramatic improvements on all aspects – especially complexity and power consumption. This has led to availability of low-cost devices which last significantly longer enabling applications such as continuously monitoring multiple parameters of a worker and automatically raising alerts in case of any anomalies

Analytics – Large volume of IoT devices being used for multiple applications in the industry has led to a large amount of data being made available. Today, analytics is being used to derive crucial insights from this data – some examples being creating a health and safety index for each worker to proactively identify workers at risk for an accident and suitably correcting the same. Analytics enables safety to evolve from a reactive to a proactive stage by building intelligence at an individual-level and using it to enhance compliance

4. What new safety products and solutions do you plan to launch in India in the near future?

· Safety market in India is very huge and fragments, at the same time Indian companies are in early stages of adopting Smart safety solutions at Personal level.

·         We are currently in the market development phase, in the short run we intend to continue to expand our existing Safety Watch and ID Card tracker while in look out to develop other opportunities in the Smart PPE space etc.

·         Tata Communications being a solutions provider as an eventual goal is to develop a Safety-as-a-Platform / Safety-as-a-Service proposition which would enable other Partner / firms who develop smart safety solutions to run on IOT technology Backbone and service expertise

5. What are your views on UBM’s OSH India show and the role played by it in connecting the OSH community on one platform?

In our opinion the event was a great initiative to bring in to foray a subject which is a very integral to Operations. The companies who attended where very well reputed manufacturers as well as product firms.