Safety of workers in hazardous environments are critical and where events can be life threatening or a serious health hazard, an automated process must be initiated/implemented to ensure that their safety has the highest priority.

This automated process must ensure that an infallible process of personnel access control is enforced by using a multi element checking mechanism to ensure that no one is within the health or life threating restricted areas or environments before these events are initiated and in progress.

In the mining industry a specific shift is allocated to the blasting team and at the time that the blasting event is actioned, the team leader needs to be 100% sure that no one is within the region of the blast. To ensure this, the access turnstiles to the shaft is fitted with a multi element mechanism set consisting of a biometric and multi antenna RFID readers. These readers correlate the biometric reading with preassigned RFID tag numbers in a database ensuring that the specific user is associated with the safety equipment and wears all the required equipment pieces, by the reader before allowing access to the mining shaft and the entry of the person’s details on the blast-list. On return of shift completion the equipment tags and biometric readings are compared and exit through the turnstile is allowed and checked on completion the persons details is removed from the blast-list. The defined process then addresses two key issues, multi layered access control and asset tracking of equipment.

The servicing of tagged safety equipment schedules can be automated and tracked through an add- on databased application and this add-on can also check the validity of medical certificates, miners tickets, drivers and operator licenses. Users are automatically warned prior to the expiry of any certificates, tickets and licenses.

The same concept is valid in the spray painting booths of vehicle manufactures, casting foundries, chemical processing plants, slaughter houses and many other hazardous and dangerous working environments.