| dc.description.abstract | A new personal exposure monitor and alarm system (called E-PAS) has been developed in this research. The E-PAS can precisely detect the positions of thirty-two different workers, determine the durations within the exposed area, measure the levels of exposure in that area, and record these exposure data into an internet database. The E-PAS continuously calculates doses of each individual worker and sends various alarm parameters to a particular worker if his/her doses should exceed upper limits. The worker, therefore, can take proper actions based on these personalized alarm messages.
In addition, an automatic calibration system has also been developed as a substitute of the conventional golden standard, the direct observation method, for laboratory tests of the E-PAS.
The reproducibility tests indicated that the E-PAS had 95 to 100% accuracy in determining the worker’s positions, and that it made no mistake to generate alarms based on commands from the remote host computer. The laboratory tests showed that the worker’s time-activity pattern measured by the E-PAS were highly correlated with that obtained by human observations (R2=0.91~0.99). Furthermore, when a worker’s exposure data exceeded the permissible exposure limit, the E-PAS created alarms with 100% accuracy, and the average delay time of these alarms was 2.8(±1.5) seconds. Since E-PAS has good performance in personal alarm, it is a great tool for the protection of workers’ safety and health. | en_US |