How Wireless Power Will Protect Your Warehouse and Factory Workers

Warehouse worker taking package in the shelf in a large warehouse in a large warehouse

Keeping your workers safe from harm is not only the right thing to do, it makes good business sense overall: less sick time, fewer insurance claims, and improved worker morale, to name a few.

As you run your warehouses or factories, you know that safety best practices go beyond wired smoke and CO detectors with backup batteries. Sometimes accidents happen even when the safety checklists are followed to a T.

Why? Because we didn’t see (or hear or smell) the danger coming. Because we didn’t have the sensors and alerts set up or the power failed. Because we needed a short-term work-around to get power from here to there, which caused a tripping hazard.

Fire, falls, slips, and equipment accidents are high on the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s list of risks in the workplace. Training staff and relying on management to follow safety protocols are important steps, but there is one more thing you can do to ensure their safety: invest in a future of wireless power.

Wireless Power Makes More Comprehensive Safety Possible

Wireless power removes many of the obstacles, like cost of wiring and buildout, that keep us from setting up an even safer environment. Wireless power can help remove workplace dangers caused by human error or unawareness about a potentially dangerous situation.

Here are a few examples of how wireless power can improve safety in the workplace:

Light up dark storage areas with strategically placed motion-sensitive lights that are wirelessly powered and don’t need wiring or batteries. An overhead light may not be enough to avoid tripping or banging a head in a tight space.
Replace small device chargers with wireless power receivers to eliminate charging stations and extension cords, which can be a tripping hazard.
Replace tethered devices, like small robots and autonomous equipment, with wireless power to avoid maintaining miles of cable.
Retrofit current battery-operated safety devices, like smoke detectors and environmental sensors with wireless power receivers. Wireless power is delivered as needed, without user oversight, and does not die on you at the worst time, like batteries often do.
Create a well-lit emergency exit pathway with wirelessly powered exit signs, path lights, and lights around emergency equipment like fire extinguishers when an alarm is triggered.
Avoid fire from poorly installed, worn, or exposed wires, especially in areas where there’s risk of electric shock. Use wireless power to reduce risk.
Leverage wireless power for all your environmental sensors and alarms, to help ensure continuous protection, and your inventory sensors, to reduce the need for in-person product checking.
Increase safety on forklifts and other small vehicles by adding backup cameras, driving data trackers, and sensors for deflated tires, speed, and maintenance issues. In-vehicle alerts can help make drivers safer.
Improve communication with always-on wireless power walkie talkies.

Wireless Power Soon to Be Everywhere

In the next 10 years, we will see the number of IoT devices that are designed for greater safety, security, and health, skyrocket. With all of these devices comes the need for reliable, efficient power without having to rewire spaces or add more battery cost and management.

Ossia’s Cota Wireless Power delivers power over a distance. In a warehouse, multiple Cota transmitters would be installed and linked throughout the building, possibly as ceiling tiles.

The Cota-enabled devices within the building will send beacon signals; when a transmitter or set of linked transmitters are within range, the beacon will bounce off of walls and objects (but not people) to find the transmitter. When the transmitter receives the signal, it will send power back through the same path, again avoiding people.

If the devices are always in the building, they will always be charged and ready to go. The days of low battery power and downtime due to charging are behind us.