# Wearables for Industrial Work Safety: A Survey
###### Abstract
Wristbands and bracelets currently occupy the leading position among wearable devices and smartwatches, which market share is almost 50% [16]. As of today, research literature still lacks comprehensive reviews on wearable technology and its industrial utilization [17]. The most solid work considering this topic is [18]. In this paper, the authors distinguished 24 categories of wearable technologies and divided them into five groups depending on the functions; monitoring, tracking, augmenting, assisting, and delivering content. Moreover, they highlight six motivations behind the use of wearable devices in industrial environments: the ability to monitor employees' psychological and physiological factors, enhance operational efficiency, promote work environment safety and security, and improve workers' health. Finally, they revealed the main challenge groups compliant with the adoption of wearable devices; technological challenges (trade-off between size, weight, battery functions, accuracy, etc. ), social challenges (confidentiality of data, lack of technical skills, high dependency on the wearable device), policies and standards set by governments, economic challenges (high cost of the wearable devices and its integration with other systems), and data challenges (data ownership issue, huge amount of data). In particular, authors in [19] review wearable devices as part of the IoT concept, mentioning work safety in the list of areas where this technology is beneficial but without special focus on it. On the opposite, some other works explore the use of wearable devices in a narrow specific area of the industry. Moreover, the authors of [20] consider the mining industry, while work [21] deals with the construction industry. However, to the best of the author's knowledge, none of these works investigates industrial wearables focusing on occupational safety or reviews key aspects of data collection, data transmission, and localization. Driven by the works mentioned above, this paper aims to analyze and integrate information related to wearable devices and provides a comprehensive overview of the different features of their use in maintaining and increasing work safety in potentially hazardous industries, as depicted in Figure 1.  
For this work, we formulated the following research questions:  
* What functions of wearable devices allow enterprises to increase work safety level and how? * What metrics and techniques are common in wearable devices? and which of them are the most promising in the industrial case? * What are the current research gaps in the field of industrial wearables for occupational safety? To find the answers to our research questions, a widely-used methodology was adopted to carry out a systematic literature review based on the PRISMA [22]. To identify key publications on the analysis of wearable technology for work safety, we performed a literature search in scientific databases that cover leading computer science journals and conferences including _IEEE Xplore_, _ACM Digital Library_, _ScienceDirect_, _SAGE Journals Online_, and _Springer Link_. To find relevant articles and papers for our research, we applied the following search string: _(Wearable OR \"Body Area\") AND (Safety OR Industr\" OR Injury)_ for the past five years and in the fields of Electrical Engineering, Applied Physics, Telecommunications, Biomedical Engineering, and Computer Information Systems. In total, we gathered a set of 1290 potentially relevant publications, excluding grey literature and pre-prints. We then analyzed the titles, keywords, and abstracts of the publications to identify papers and articles that describe at least one modeling or simulation approach for distributed ledgers. While doing so, we selected a total of 75 publications. To further extend our literature sample, we analyzed the selected publications' references for additional papers relevant to our research. Following this process, it resulted in a total of 68 publications.