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Confined Spaces Monitoring for Operations Safety and Efficiency - Phase III

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Confined Spaces Monitoring for Operations Safety and Efficiency – Phase III

NCMS Project #: 142191

Problem: Confined spaces can pose hazards to workers required to perform maintenance and sustainment tasks in these areas.  Beyond difficulties with entering, exiting, and limited workspace, there are a myriad of potentially serious hazards including insufficient oxygen supply, flammable or explosive atmospheres, toxic gases, and electrical or mechanical hazards.

Benefit: The CSMS will support prevention, detection, and intervention of health and safety hazards while greatly reducing the time, costs, and manpower required by current confined space monitoring maintenance and sustainment practices.  The general public also benefits when this technology is adopted by industries impacted by OSHA confined spaces regulations.

Solution/Approach: In the Phase I effort, a baseline test and evaluation was performed of the Navy Confined Spaces Monitoring System (CSMS).  Using the results of this baseline test, an extended system design specification was produced to meet the U.S Navy shipyard requirements.  Phase II used these test results to produce a prototype Navy CSMS which that was tested in a representative shipyard environment.  Phase III will leverage the successes during the initial phases to enable real-time assessment of workers in confined hazardous environments.  This phase represents an evolution and expansion of this technology to support prevention, detection, and intervention of health and safety hazards.

Impact on Warfighter:

  • Reduce risks, time, and costs 
  • Increase worker safety 
  • Establish and maintain communication 
  • Automated data capture reduces manual data entry requirements improving accuracy 
  • Improve warfighter readiness 

DOD Participation:

  • U.S. Navy
  • U.S. Air Force (observer)

Industry Participation:

  • Aptima, Inc.
  • Sentinel Occupational Safety, Inc. (observer)
  • Tetrad Digital Integrity (observer)
  • NCMS

Benefit Area(s):

  • Cost savings
  • Positive environmental impact
  • Safety
  • Maintenance management improvement
  • Improved readiness
  • Reliability improvement

Focus Area:

  • Reliability improvement (hardware)