Controlling workplace dust exposure with data

Our partner, Trolex, recently unveiled the XD1+ Personal Dust Monitor. This revolutionary workplace wearable is designed to be the most lightweight, easiest-to-use dust monitoring technology on the market. 

The kit itself is compact, simple, and low maintenance. You just switch it on, secure it in place, and you’re good to go. But what makes the XD1+ so unique and powerful is the way that it leverages Reactec’s powerful Analytics to seamlessly deliver insight across your entire team, empowering individual workers and duty holders to take appropriate action when it comes to reducing the risk of exposure to harmful dust.

In this blog, we’ll explore the key ways that Reactec’s powerful Analytics can level up the way your team approaches dust monitoring in the workplace.

1). Offering a more representative, realistic picture of the workplace:

Historically, teams have taken stock of their dust environments by employing professionals to carry out expensive assessments and generate reports. Teams then use this information to try and create a safer workplace.

But these types of reports - on their own - are not enough to help teams create truly safer, more informed workplaces, for two primary reasons: 1) they aren’t representative of a real working environment. Professional assessments only capture a snapshot of the type and amount of dust in a workplace at the time and place of the assessment. This means that any changes that occur in the environment from day-to-day, or week-to-week - or any difference in exposure that occurs from person to person - remain unknown and potentially under-managed. 2) These reports don’t measure the effectiveness of controls. This means that workers don’t know whether and to what extent their controls are effective; a crucial piece of information when it comes to reducing the risk of exposure to many workplace risks, including harmful dust.

Ultimately, the strongest approach is to combine modern, on-the-ground technology like the XD1+ with periodic professional assessments. This gives your team the best opportunity to truly take control of your risk environment with regards to dangerous dust.

2). Streamlining and democratising your approach to risk management:

The power to consolidate data and insight into one central, accessible location is a critical component of effective workplace risk management technology. Simply collecting information - however detailed - isn’t good enough. Teams must combine accurate record-keeping with meaningful insight in order to take their risk management to the next level.

Reactec’s technology helps teams to do exactly that: powerful Analytics reliably, accurately collect and collate your data before transforming it into clear, actionable insight that you and your team can use to adjust your behaviour or refine your controls. And this process happens without any heavy lifting on your end: information is retrieved automatically from your workplace wearables before Analytics is performed on it behind the scenes. No fancy commands, coding, or computer work is required.

Plus, helpful reports are generated and distributed automatically to whomever you want, whenever you want - meaning your approach to risk management can be easily democratised throughout your organisation.

3). Telling a clear, complete story with your data:

Data - on its own - can be confusing, boring, or overwhelming, especially for the average business user. You shouldn’t need a degree in Business Intelligence to be able to make data-driven decisions for your team and your business. That’s where Analytics comes in: Analytics brings your data to life, and enables your teams to interact with it meaningfully. This further democratises your data by making it more accessible and easy to understand, but it doesn’t stop there.

Because Analytics from multiple sources can be easily layered, the story you tell with your data isn’t just one-dimensional. With this powerful technology, you can layer data from the Trolex XD1+ with data from Reactec’s suite of workplace wearable technology, including information for individual workers’ exposure to vibration and noise.

This point is crucial: the integration with Reactec (made possible with the Reactec RASOR) is what makes it possible for you to understand an individual workers’ level of risk. Before the XD1+ is deployed, you use RASOR to assign it to a specific team member. This way, when data is collated and analysed, you already know which worker it belongs to, without the need for any tedious, time-consuming manual record keeping.

With this personalised information, you can readily - and reliably - understand who’s level of risk the data represents.

And with such a holistic set of information available to you, you can paint a more complete, more accurate picture of your workplace risk environment than you ever have before. From there, you can more easily identify hotspots, bottlenecks, and general trends, and start taking meaningful action in the areas where it’s needed the most.

Ultimately, Reactec’s Analytics is a powerful solution that helps you remove expensive and unreliable guesswork from your risk management efforts with regards to dangerous dust (and more!)

By partnering with Trolex, Reactec has helped to transform the XD1+ into a truly revolutionary and personalised dust monitor capable of bringing intelligent, actionable insight to the workplace.