Lone worker safety with no boundaries

Lone workers in the outback of Australia (outside of terrestrial coverage) will soon be able to send real-time alerts to their back office using Trimble’s transport and logistics solutions thanks to its new partnership with Iridium. The Iridium solution extends communications of the Trimble technology over satellite and will be available in Australia from December.

With more than 86% of Australia’s landmass classified as remote or very remote, lone worker safety has been an issue for critical industries such as mining and agriculture, as well as interstate land transport routes. Journeys across remote regions can carry some significant safety and operational concerns, and nearly half of Australia’s fatal road accidents occur on regional roads.

Under partnership, Iridium will deliver satellite machine-to-machine (M2M) connectivity services across Trimble’s core Transport and Logistics (T&L) solutions, providing transport operators with a consistent level of fleet visibility in remote areas where high-speed cellular data coverage is limited.

Tom Debeule, business development manager for Trimble in Australia, said the partnership will cover all of Trimble’s T&L solutions, including fatigue management, driving style monitoring, breakdown alerts, vehicle performance management, journey optimisation, remote consignment updates and live monitoring of cargo such as refrigerated food, chemicals or liquid fuel.

Debeule agrees that data over satellite is more expensive than terrestrial coverage, but the way the company has kept costs down is to let the user configure the system and decide which data should be sent via satellite if there is no terrestrial coverage. For example, a user may decide that only emergency alerts should be sent via satellite.

“This is important for lone worker safety,” he says. “If you are a driver in the middle of nowhere with no mobile coverage, you are 100% sure as soon as you press the button somebody in the back office will get the message and someone will come and help you.”

Although the satellite coverage is linked to the truck, Debeule says there are also ways of connecting the lone worker outside of the truck. “For example, with one of our customers in Australia we have introduced a lone worker pendant, which is basically a pendant that is worn around the neck. If the driver presses the button on the pendant it sends a signal to the truck and then the truck can send the signal over satellite if there is no terrestrial coverage.”

Michel Van Maercke, general manager of Trimble’s Transport and Logistics division in Asia Pacific and EMEA, was in Australia this week and he commented: “We have very limited demands for satellite coverage in Europe because most areas have 100% coverage with the cellular networks. This development [which took over a year to implement] is an investment we made for Australia and shows we are here to stay in the long term.

“The changes we made were on the device level and server/back office level. Because the messages that we receive from a satellite are very different to the normal messages that we receive from 3G and cellular networks, we had to make the changes to both to get the real-time message through.”

Debeule says the advantage for a transport operator is that the same back-end software can be used. “The system is transparent and the message will look the same for the user regardless of whether it was sent through the terrestrial coverage or the satellite. The most important thing is having the data in real time and being able to react on that alarm immediately.”

Asked about the global trends in transport safety, Van Maercke says safety is all about getting real-time data, and one of the trends he is noticing more and more within Trimble, and also within the broader market, is the big data trend. He said the big data is then used to create score cards on drivers, trucks and even cargo.

“Another emerging technology is video solutions becoming more integrated in real time and based on specific events,” says Van Maercke. “For example, if a truck is driving at 90 km/h and then there is huge deceleration, at that time the video system can be triggered to start sending the video recordings. The system is based on specific events such as hard braking, harsh deceleration or harsh cornering, and those events can alert the system. They can also go one step further and base the system on specific timing to check how things are going; for example, how awake the driver is at a specific time.” Van Maercke did point out that these systems with images would only be possible with cellular coverage as it would be too much data over satellite.

The new partnership with Iridium and Trimble that enables satellite coverage is not only designed to improve truck driver safety but also management of trucks in remote parts of Australia. “Satellite communications works both ways,” says Debeule. “If a driver is out of coverage and approaching an unsafe situation, such as a flood, the Trimble system can also use the satellite coverage to inform the driver of the hazard or any other safety instructions that need to be communicated.”

This consistent visibility is designed to deliver improved truck driver safety and asset management in remote parts of Australia. The services will be available via Trimble’s T&L solutions in Australia from December.