# Wearables for Industrial Work Safety: A Survey
###### Abstract  
Today, ensuring work safety is considered to be one of the top priorities for various industries. Workplace injuries, illnesses, and deaths often entail substantial production and financial losses, governmental checks, series of dismissals, and loss of reputation. Wearable devices are one of the technologies that flourished with the fourth industrial revolution or Industry 4.0, allowing employers to monitor and maintain safety at workplaces. The purpose of this article is to systematize knowledge in the field of industrial wearables' safety to assess the relevance of their use in enterprises as the technology maintaining occupational safety, to correlate the benefits and costs of their implementation, and, by identifying research gaps, to outline promising directions for future work in this area. We categorize industrial wearable functions into four classes (monitoring, supporting, training, and tracking) and provide a classification of the metrics collected by wearables to better understand the potential role of wearable technology in preserving workplace safety. Furthermore, we discuss key communication technologies and localization techniques utilized in wearable-based work safety solutions. Finally, we analyze the main challenges that need to be addressed to further enable and support the use of wearable devices for industrial work safety. wearables; smart devices; occupational safety; IIoT; data collection; communications; localization +
Footnote †: journal: Sensors  
0000-0001-8844-3300][PERSON] 12 The problem of work safety in industrial environments is still on the crest of a wave. Worldwide statistics show a high rate of death and injury at work, a variety of hazardous industries, and sources of danger [3]. With the advent of Industry 4.0 and broad integration of the Internet of Things (IoT), employers are expected to achieve better safety mainly due to the emergence of various technologies [5]. This paper is primarily focusing on the smallest form-factor personal devices, namely, wearables, that also attempt to achieve the same goal as part of the Internet of Wearable Things (IoWT) paradigm [6]. Further discussion will focus on the Industrial IoT (IIoT) that emerged to design, maintain, monitor, optimize, and analyze industrial operations to gain real-time insights, make effective decisions and maintain occupational safety [7; 8]. Historically, the IIoT was at the initial stage of its development as of 2015 [9]. At this point, many entrepreneurs had doubts about the feasibility of introducing such an innovation due to the uncertainty about the impact that it will have on workers, labor processes, production, and, more importantly, profits. The situation has begun to change in the last five years. According to [7], the IIoT market size is estimated at 77 billion USD, with a perspective reaching 110 billion USD by 2025. However, this forecast was delivered before the spread of the COVID-19. Due to the global pandemic situation, many enterprises terminated their businesses or even claimed bankruptcy. Indirectly, we can estimate a decrease in production capacity by an increase in unemployment. For example, one of the most significant blows hit the manufacturing, construction, transportation, and storage sectors according to the UK statistics [10; 11]. In contrast, some industrial wearable device manufacturers took advantage of the situation by adjusting products to the circumstances. For example, Estimote has redesigned its industrial wearable tracking devices to remember contacts between workers closer than two meters [11; 12]. By meeting two basic requirements for any IoT device, namely, access to the Internet and communication solutions, wearables have become one of the most important IoT concepts, forming IoWT as a promising yet young segment. Various forecasts state that the wearable device market will reach 57 billion USD by 2022 [13], or even 64 billion USD by 2025 [14], and 104 billion USD by 2027 [15].