Over the last few years, important changes are taking place in manufacturing factories to meet an optimum balance between competitivity and sustainability business target. The workers’ health and safety is not detached from to these changes and therefore the Spanish project FASyS (the Spanish acronym for Absolutely Safe and Healthy Factory – Fábrica Absolutamente Segura y Saludable) is working on the development of innovative methodologies and technical solutions that contribute to the competitiveness and sustainability of industries giving prominence to the workers’ wellness and comfort.

According to the European vision of the Factory of the Future, manufacturing environments will become highly dynamic, with more sophisticated products and technologies, with greater variability in the production and dwindling series. Based on this vision, the efficient production in competitive and sustainable terms should provide the worker with a central importance in the factory (paradigm "factory worker first") and therefore, the worker’s health and safety will become a key factor for the performance of the factory of the future. However, current methods for health and safety management does not have a comprehensive vision, as it is designed independently of the rest of the factory. In fact, health and safety is often considered as an added value, not as a fundamental part of the factory and its processes.

In parallel, the European Strategy for Safety and Health at Work 2007 - 2012, sets an objective of 25% reduction in workplace accidents and to address the new occupational hazards, all within the framework of improving the quality and productivity at work in Europe. These strategic objectives lend the management of safety and health at work an additional competitive nature.

Within the context of new productive model where workers become key factors of competitiveness, FASyS takes as its main objective the improvement of business competitiveness through new levels of industrial safety and workplace comfort. FASyS project aims at implementing both the excellence model for integrated occupational health and safety management in the handling, machining and assembly industries, together with a new generation of safety technologies and solutions.

Currently, production systems are organized around work and tasks. As a consequence, technology has been developed capable of monitoring and actuating properly on work equipments and production processes. However, a worker-centric production paradigm shift highlights the existing technological gaps in terms of trying to effectively and efficiently manage the human factor. It is worth nothing that the human factor is considered one of the main causes of accidents. FASyS will leverage the legal and socio-economical methodological framework supported by cutting-edge technology to monitor, interact and incorporate the human factor as an integral and interactive part of the manufacturing process, in a similar way to what is currently done with manufacturing equipment. In an intelligent factory environment, FASyS places the worker as a further element of the digital ecosystem.

In order to ensure the future impact of the project results, FASyS has taken as its starting point the general framework of proactive risk management provided by ISO31000:2009: Risk management - Principles and guidelines. This standard has been suggested by the European Technology Platform on Industrial Safety (ETPIS) as the framework for managing future manufacturing environments.

FASyS has analyzed the diversity of issues that may affect workers’ safety and health in handling, machining and assembly factories, focusing on the 13 most prevalent hazards:

-          outrages and collisions,

-          trapping,

-          impactsand blows,

-          electricity,

-          fallsfromheight,

-          same-level falls (slips an trips),

-          awkwardbodypostures,

-          repetitivemovements,

-          manual handling of loads,

-          chemicals,

-          noise and vibration,

-          psychosocial issues,

-          limited medical history of workers.

The FASyS solution addresses such hazards from the design phase to minimise the potential impact and occurrence. Then, during the operational phase, FASyS promotes a proactive control supported by a solid characterisation of risk evolution patterns, the identification of the most relevant risk indicators and the development of effective mechanisms for integrated risk detection. From a technological perspective, FASyS provides a complete platform for pervasive sensing, advanced reasoning capabilities and a more autonomous response towards risk mitigation and worker information and training. In particular, the new technologies and safety solutions compiled under the FASyS system fall into five major groups:

Safety detection and assessment techniques:

-         Industrial safety ontologies and reasoning engines.

-         Smart ergonomic characterisation solutions.

-         Functional workplace adaptation models.

-         Human error identification systems.

-         Models for detecting psycho-social indicators and profiles.

-         Adapted learning solutions.

-         Chemical sensors for pollutant detection.

Sensor networks and communication solutions:

-         Wireless sensor networks and activity monitoring.

-         Communications safety and privacy systems.

-         Wireless communication in industrial environments.

Health diagnosis and continuous monitoring systems:

-         Applications for intelligent video analysis.

-         Real-time risk detection tools.

-         Automatic medical alert warning system.

-         Occupational pathology assessment/diagnosis protocols.

Safe manufacturing equipment and processes:

-         Part manipulation and part feeding systems.

-         Volumetric protection systems.

-         Auto-calibration and auto-compensation systems for large units.

-         Intelligent part movement guiding systems.

-         Visualisation systems for part/tool referencing.

Comprehensive risk control systems:

-         Personalised risk prevention strategies.

-         Personalised decision support systems.

-         Semantic solutions for services coordination.

-         Emotional interfaces for effective risk communication.

FASyS is generating -in an integrated manner- new knowledge (legal, socio-economic framework, methodologies and technologies- to ensure the continuous safety and wellness of workers in handling, machining and assembly factories of the future, allowing workers to become key factors of competitiveness and differentiation of the new production model. Thus, through the project are pursued the following challenges:

• Enable a new optimized workplace concept for worker wellness and comfort under conditions of absolute safety and ergonomics to improve productivity.
• Provide a model of reference in the excellent management of safety and health for the handling, machining and assembly factories of the future.

To meet these challenges, it is considered the technical, organizational and human resources to identify, detect, monitor and manage, on a continuous and effective manner, risks relating to health and safety through out the complete life cycle of the plant.

The FASyS system takes into account the technology and knowledge for intelligent management and personalized prevention strategies. Such approach facilitates a coordinated action regarding the needs of individual workers in terms of health, ergonomics, psychosociology, safety and industrial hygiene. FASyS employs multivariable techniques and procedures for early detection, smart diagnosis and continuous monitoring of multiple stressors, musculoskeletal fatigue, cardiovascular response and respiratory capacity.

The FASyS has proposed new means for behavioural change of employees through development of emotional interfaces and advanced training methods. In the same way, FASyS has demonstrated a new family of technological solutions enabling a more flexible and adaptive collaboration among workers and a new generation of manufacturing equipment. Thus, FASyS contributes to optimize conditions of the workplace combining the requirements of the task and the worker’s characteristics who performed it.