Why Utility Workers Need Rugged Mobile Devices Ready for Just About Anything

Why Utility Workers Need Rugged Mobile Devices Ready for Just About Anything

Jo Satili

It’s rare these days to see a utility line worker on the job without some type of mobile handheld device. Utilities across the board—electric, water, oil, gas, and telecommunications—are outfitting field workers with these devices for everything from communicating with headquarters, completing and transmitting work orders, and undertaking safety audits to dispatching and routing.

According to Chartwell, a utilities research company, tablet use among utilities doubled between 2014 and 2015, while the use of rugged laptops grew from 62 to 68 percent. And these numbers have continued to grow over time.

Mobility Needs of Utility Workers

Mobility is critical for utilities today. Utility line workers are outside the majority of their day and often deal with extreme weather and work in standing water, underground, or on ladders. And they are under pressure to complete jobs on time to maintain their companies’ productivity and customer satisfaction goals.

That’s why so many utilities are choosing to outfit their line workers with rugged mobile devices—devices that can withstand extreme temperatures, sand and dirt, drops, direct sunlight, moisture, and even interaction with chemicals. Today, field workers use their rugged mobile devices for nearly every task on the job, whether it’s inspecting the field, navigating to a site, or submitting work orders and reports at the end of the day.

In a typical day, for example, a line worker can use a rugged mobile device to receive work instructions, review utility and infrastructure maps, communicate with headquarters, display information to customers, take and transmit photos, monitor and diagnose problems, complete safety audits and compliance reports, locate the site of the next job, and schedule needed repairs.

While these daily tasks and requirements are critical to all utilities, it’s the hazardous, difficult and extreme weather situations where rugged mobile devices really shine, including:

  • Use on job sites requiring extra safety precautions or hazard protection
  • Exposure to water
  • Exposure to dust, dirt and sand
  • Exposure to extreme temperatures
  • Exposure to extreme humidity
  • Exposure to chemicals or chemical residue
  • Use in direct sunlight
  • Use from high heights or high altitudes
  • Use under strong pressure or vibrations
  • Use in areas with highelectromagnetic interference

Any or all of these issues can make it difficult for field workers to use mobile devices easily, and can cause the devices themselves to malfunction or fail. That’s why it’s so important to consider rugged mobile devices—especially those that have been rigorously tested against the most demanding industry standards. In most cases, the toughest standards come from the U.S. military. MIL-STD 810G, for example, requires stringent testing against many of these challenges. Choosing rugged mobile units that are tested to meet the MIL-STD 810G and have an independent third party validate the testing helps ensure consistency and productivity on the job.  

How to Choose the Right Rugged Devices for Utility Workers

Not all devices are appropriate for all field situations. Make sure to choose rugged devices that meet or exceed your requirements in the most vulnerable areas for your field workers. For example, if your workers routinely must work in direct sunlight, choose devices with very bright, high-definition displays. If workers routinely come in contact with moisture, make sure units are watertight. For exposure to dust, dirt or sand, choose units with sealed ports, connectors, hinges, keyboards and LCD panels. If workers must work on high ladders or rooftops, choose units with magnesium alloy cases, rounded and reinforced corners, internal components designed to withstand impact and absorb shock, raised bezels and shock mounts.

Of course, all rugged mobile devices should have the basics: the ability to be used with gloved hands, powerful processors, long battery life with hot-swappable batteries, offer highly secure enterprise-grade security, and a full range of connectivity options.

Today’s utility workers have more choices than ever before when it comes to using the right rugged mobile devices for the job. That’s why it pays to do the research and choose the most durable, rigorously tested devices available—devices that won’t stop workers from getting the job done.

Learn more about Panasonic's rugged solutions for utilities here.

The Internet of Vehicles

the-internet-of-vehicles

The Internet of Vehicles

3 minutes

As innovation accelerates, it isn’t hard to imagine a world where cars drive themselves, or even fly. But cars that talk and think? You might be shaking your head, but that’s exactly where mobility is headed.

At ITS World Congress that starts in mid-September in Copenhagen, Panasonic’s Jarrett Wendt will offer ideas on the connected vehicle ecosystem enabling cars to communicate with each other and the road around them. If your travels don’t include Denmark in September, here are a few highlights.

The world is changing at hyper speed

As anyone in the tech world understands, disruption is the new normal. Constant innovation is now the price of entry, and the rate of change is increasing exponentially. Adoption rates have also accelerated dramatically. As inventor and futurist and Ray Kurzweil noted, we won’t experience 100 years of progress in this century – at today’s accelerated pace, it will be more like 20,000 years worth.

In our recent “Moving Forward,” research series, Panasonic Corp. of North America assesses how senior technology decision makers in industries including automotive view the technologies they see driving us forward, and the impact of these technologies on future plans. By 2025, 10 disruptive technologies are expected to generate trillions of dollars of economic impact. Our new research reveals that tech decision makers in automotive, avionics industries and related government agencies say their companies have already adopted five of these technologies on average. And four have risen to the top of their innovation agendas – energy storage, autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence and sustainable energy. Panasonic is deeply engaged in all of them.

The future of transportation is integrated

There has been a great deal of prototyping and testing of Intelligent Transportation Systems, but working with the Colorado Dept. of Transportation, Panasonic has developed a phased approach that will allow DOTs to effectively deploy these technologies at scale. Not just a system for main highways and thoroughfares, but for all roadways and arteries throughout an entire state or region.

Our role? A technology-agnostic strategic consultant, general contractor and solution integrator.

We’re one year into our real-world deployment along a particularly challenging 90 mile stretch of I-70 in Colorado, connecting Denver to Vail, where Coloradans face steep grades, severe curves, often-extreme weather, visibility and congestion difficulties. This is a 5-year, $72 million V2X program featuring a road-operator managed data platform deployed on active, open roadways.

Data has the power to drive safety

With our Intelligent Transportation solution, we’re talking about empowering DOTs with the ability to analyze everything from speed and heading, to windshield wiper and traction control status – providing valuable context on road conditions.

Suddenly, a roadway operator can receive this data and make up-to-the-minute decisions about deploying snowplows during winter storms – or optimize how traffic flows through the city in real time.

This technology can also communicate instantly about emergency braking and crashes, and enables customized alerts to be sent to cars in specific locations instantaneously.

Imagine driving along the highway in the mountains and a crash occurs 1,000 feet down the road and around a blind turn. V2X will enable our vehicles to warn us or even react on our behalf – to prevent us from becoming a part of the incident even before the compromised vehicle is visible. And emergency services can be deployed more expeditiously, and more cost-effectively, than ever before.

Talking cars can reduce traffic

Connected vehicle technology will save lives through a significant reduction in the number of non-impaired crashes – estimates are as high as 80%. CDOT estimates as much as a 400% increase in roadway efficiency with wide scale deployment of connected vehicle technology – without the expense of widening roadways and adding lanes. The system is also expected to reduce the amount of time people spend in traffic and lessen the environmental impact of idling cars by mitigating congestion.

Read more about how disruptive technology is impacting transportation in The Year of the Smart Highway.

Authors
Tom Gebhardt - Chairman and CEO, Panasonic Corporation of North America

Building a wireless future that is far-reaching and accessible

Future of Bluetooth Mesh Networks

Building a wireless future that is far-reaching and accessible

4 minutes

The most inspiring example of the power of mesh networks, a distributed communication system, where each device acts as a node that can relay data to the others, lies in the island of Puerto Rico. That’s where a couple of volunteers with antennas, wireless mesh devices and solar panels helped to restore communications for relief effort coordinators in Barranquitas, a city battered by Hurricane Maria. “Within three days, volunteers were using both technologies to more effectively coordinate the delivery of food and medicine,” according to an article in Quartz.

Disaster management and public safety is one reason for the strong growth forecast for the global wireless mesh network market, but not the only one, according to a new report by Zion Market Research. Its study finds that the global wireless mesh network market was valued at $3.84 billion in 2017 and is expected to reach around $9.08 billion by 2024. The oil & gas Industry, video streaming and surveillance, smart mobility and smart city applications are among the biggest drivers of growth of mesh networking thanks to its promise of low-cost access to broadband services.

Bluetooth 5.0 was officially deployed in 2016 with a focus on enhancing the range, speed and data capacity for the connections. It also had another promising role: IoT connectivity. Where Bluetooth had previously been thought of as a 1-to-1 connection between devices, this concentration on IoT tech allows for the connection of multiple devices and, ultimately, the cloud.

Recent research on disruptive technology by Panasonic shows that many companies have adopted mobile devices, apps and commerce and the cloud, and three in five have adopted the Internet of Things (IoT). Senior tech decision makers believe these technologies are critical to their future success, according to our research. Clearly developments, such as mesh networking, that yield fruitful deployments of disruptive technology are important to these decision makers.

Wide-ranging applications

Bluetooth mesh network represents a major step towards a more accessible and wide-ranging wireless future. It allows for multiple devices to connect to the same network and all communicate seamlessly and in real time. A standard Bluetooth network is similar to a speaker presenting to an audience. The speaker may address the entire audience or individual members and audience members may address a question to the speaker, but audience members don’t communicate among themselves. In a Bluetooth mesh network audience members may address one another. This topology has two advantages. First, since a single message may travel along many routes to its destination, this dramatically increases the probability that the message arrives. The second advantage is the increased distance a message may travel – like one audience member speaking to another.

While standard Bluetooth recently upgraded its range in the Bluetooth 5.0 update, mesh networking hypothetically allows for infinite range if the proper chain links are in place.

Mesh networks in healthcare

There are pioneering Bluetooth mesh network examples in healthcare. Hospitals are using Bluetooth beacons to monitor and track equipment. But helping nurses locate equipment is just the surface of Bluetooth’s capabilities in the health system. Using this tech, doctors and nurses could monitor patients from anywhere, significantly reducing the need for hospital visits. These visits are both costly and potentially dangerous due to the risk of things like contagious diseases and infection. Not only would a doctor or nurse be able to monitor patients wirelessly, but a patient’s devices at home could do things like monitor temperature through biometric sensors and automatically notify the drug store to deliver medicine if the patient got a fever.

Benefits to manufacturing

There are also clear benefits from the Bluetooth mesh network in the manufacturing sector, especially where multiple machines operate simultaneously on the plant floor. Previously, if two devices situated beyond the range of a Bluetooth device needed to communicate, it would require either a wired connection or gateway that could connect to the cloud. This cloud connection requires Wi-Fi, which uses significantly more energy. Now with the mesh network, every single device in the entire factory can connect to each other via Bluetooth, and even the ones farthest away can communicate if necessary by bouncing the signal through other devices on the way.

Bluetooth mesh networking is just one piece of the wireless future that is to come. Read more in our Future of Wireless Everything series. 

Authors
Jeff Howell - President of Panasonic Industrial Devices Sales Company of America