Project description
Smart heating suit improves safety for sub-zero workers
Over 9 million people worldwide work in sub-zero environments, with 200 000 of these in oil and gas rigs in North Europe. Protecting them adequately without hampering movement is a special issue resolved by QOOWEAR through its unique ‘Smart Interconnected Heating Suit’ (SIHS). This AI-controlled heating garment has embedded sensors that monitor the surrounding environment, detect the parts of the body that are the coldest, and warm them. The ‘connected worker’ wears the ultra-lightweight and anti-sweat suit next to the skin as a base layer. Besides boosting working efficiency, the system allows companies to monitor the health of workers and predict threatening conditions through the use of collected biodata, warning the company with pop-up alerts.
Objective
"QOOWEAR’s project aims at addressing the Oil& Gas industry technological challenge to create and adopt a technology that could process data from monitoring systems embedded in workers’ equipment – a concept known as ""Connected Worker"".
In 2017 the World Economic Forum stated that “The Oil&Gas Industry entails risky activities and the potential for connected worker technologies to improve safety is particularly relevant”.
QOOWEAR will bring to the market the World’s First Smart Interconnected Heating Suite (SIHS) to the Oil&Gas workers, a radically innovative system which recognizes the coldest points of the body, giving them the priority to be heated. It is a base-layer, worn in contact with the skin, 100% embeddable into existing equipment. The hardware embeds sensors to check the environment around the body in real time, to decide where and how much it needs to be heated.
At the same time, the Suite embeds a Software as a Service (SAAS), representing a deep value proposition of the project, which will enable workers’ data bio-tracking. Thanks to the connected worker system, companies will be able to monitor state of health of workers in real time and in remote, based on pattern recognition’s algorithms (AI). Those algorithms allow the prediction and anticipation of safety risks on the field, generating automatic alarms in case of real emergency (pop-up alerts via Dashboard).
This project aims at improving the living condition of people who work in subzero environments, that corresponds approximately to 9 Million workers worldwide. Specifically, QOOWEAR will address the North European Oil&Gas market, that is the Service Available Market (SAM) composed of 220.000 workers. Moreover, benchmark analysis has shown the lack of direct competitors.
QOOWEAR’s Team has capabilities both in terms of technology track record and business administration, with members of the NASA and Co-founders with engineering background.
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Fields of science
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1Coordinator
73100 LECCE
Italy
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.