# Wearables for Industrial Work Safety: A Survey
## 4 Challenges and Future Perspective  
Nowadays, the innovations' speed has significantly increased compared with the last decades: the new technologies boost the development of another technology, facilitate our lives, and create solutions in different areas, including the enterprises' sector. Along with the challenge of improving work efficiency, IIoT, and wearable devices, as part of it, help the industry cope with the challenge of ensuring a high safety level at work. However, the new technologies open new opportunities and bring new questions and the old challenges for which no reliable solution has been found. In this section, we summarized the most significant ones in Table 7. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{p{113.8 pt} p{113.8 pt} p{113.8 pt} p{113.8 pt}} \hline \hline
**Challenge** & **Groups** & **Refs.** & **Possible solutions** \\ \hline Localization accuracy & T & [173; 174] & Applying of ML algorithms to identify missing values, predict the number of obstacles and distance between RX and TX \\ \cline{3-4} indoors/outdoors & & [175; 176] & Seamless localization to provide smooth tracking both indoor and outdoor \\ \hline Connectivity solutions and propagation models for underground work sites & T & [177; 178] & Application requirement-based selection of connectivity solutions, developing of empirical and industrial environment-specific propagation models with on-body/off-body/body-to-body communications \\ \hline Power consumption and supply of a big amount of devices & T & [136; 179] & Energy harvesting approaches: harvesting from the sunlight, motions, temperature gradients, etc. \\ \hline Privacy and security & T, S, D & [180; 181] & Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and other lightweight cryptography \\ \hline Location data privacy & S, D & [183; 184] & Development of strong authentication schemes \\ \hline \multirow{3}{*}{\begin{tabular}{} \end{tabular} } & \multirow{3}{*}{S} & \multirow{3}{*}{\
\begin{tabular}{} \end{tabular} } & Adding noise to the exact coordinates on the device side before transmitting it to the cloud \\ \cline{3-4}  & & [185; 186] & Transmission of the location-related function instead of the coordinates \\ \hline \multirow{6}{*}{
\begin{tabular}{} \end{tabular} } & \multirow{3}{*}{S} & \multirow{3}{*}{S} & Development of the simple and detailed manual, video guidance and provision of the constant support to eliminate the problem of low technical skills of users; \\ \cline{3-4}  & & & Usage of Technology Acceptance Models (TAM) to estimate key factors affecting the level of social resistance and rearrange the process implementation of the technology accordingly \\ \cline{3-4}  & & [189] & Involving of the employees in the process of the choice of wearables \\ \cline{3-4}  & & [190] & Data flows transparency \\ \hline Heterogeneity of the IIoT devices & D, SD & [191] & Application of the data fusion approaches on the hardware level, seamless integration on the protocol level \\ \cline{3-4}  & & & & \\ \cline{3-4}  & & & & \\ \cline{3-4}  & & & & \\ \cline{3-4}  & & & & \\ \hline \multicolumn{4}{p{113.8 pt}}{} \\ \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 7: Key challenges in the adoption of industrial wearables. In [18], the authors highlight the main challenge groups compliant with the adoption of wearable devices: technological, social, economic, data-related, and standards-related. Using the same terms, let us highlight the main challenges and areas for further investigation in industrial devices, directly or indirectly contributing to preserving human health and life. In the framework of technological issues, several previous works pointed out the problems of finding the trade-off between functionality, battery life of a wearable device, its size and convenience for the user, adjusting one device to several users in big industries, management, and processing of the considerable amount of data produced by the heterogeneous devices [18; 92]. In addition to it, it is also worth noting the problem of ensuring high accuracy of positioning, especially in indoor scatter-rich environments.