SmartHat Developers Hope to Make Construction Sites Safer - RFID Journal

Researchers at Georgia Tech and Duke University have developed and tested an energy-harvesting EPC Gen 2 RFID tag and reader designed to alert workers and equipment operators in the event of an imminent collision.

A team of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Real-time Automated Project Information and Decision Systems (RAPIDS) laboratory and Duke University have completed testing of an energy-harvesting radio frequency identification system that, when tags are attached to hard hats, can issue an alert in the event that heavy equipment is moving too close to a worker on a construction site. The solution is unique, in that the tag can operate from power stored on a built-in capacitor, enabling the tag to be smaller than it would have been if it had a battery, while also ensuring that the system does not fail due to batteries requiring replacement.