Industrial Internet of Things for Safety Management Applications: A Survey

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) aims to achieve higher operational and management efficiencies by bridging machinery, equipment, human resources, and all other actors involved in an industrial environment. This bridging enables data flow over an often complex and heterogeneous communication network. It enables timely decision-making, which affects various aspects of the organization such as business, operations, maintenance, safety, stock, and logistics. Despite the plethora of works in the domain of IIoT dealing with the above aspects, very few works deal with safety in industries. Industrial safety, especially whenever it is intertwined with the safety of humans, is a critical domain and holds much scope for improvement in the context of IIoT-based solutions for industrial safety management. Through this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of the safety issues prevalent in the industries. Subsequently, we classify and provide an in-depth analysis of the safety aspects in various application areas of IIoT such as healthcare, transportation, manufacturing, and mining. Finally, we examine the research gaps in various domains and recommend future research directions. We discuss diverse forms of technologies, prototypes, systems, models, methods, and applications to ensure the safety of individuals and the risks associated with them. The primary aim of this work is to analyze and synthesize the existing researches and acknowledge the applicability of these research works towards safety management using IIoT.