CAM-59

A welder working on his own

A tunnel under construction, with the track already laid on the right and lights strung along the crown. Mid-distance, crouched against the wall, a worker is welding: you can see the arc, the sparks and his hi-vis jacket. Behind him a scaffold tower leans against the tunnel wall and the kit sits on the floor, with the leads running across the work area. Nowhere along the stretch is there anybody else.

CAM-59 · TUNNEL HOT WORK · ONE PERSON ONLY

What IRIS understands

What it recognises in this scene

welder on his own
welding arc
kit on the ground
scaffold tower

The rule

You decide once. IRIS applies it always.

welding is under way in the work area and for several minutes only one person is visible

Then

alert the safety officer so they can check whether the mate stepped away for a minute or the person is genuinely on their own
show the camera and the point in the tunnel, so they know where to go
close the alert only once there are two people in the work area again

The instruction that set it up«Tell me if someone is left welding alone in the tunnel, because down there that job is done by two people.»

What changes

What changes for whoever answers for the site

Some jobs are done by two people because the procedure says so, and welding inside a tunnel is one of them: if something happens to the welder, it is his mate who raises the alarm. Someone being left alone is almost never a breach; usually the other one has stepped out for five minutes to fetch material. The problem is that nobody sees those five minutes, because the work area is far from everything and nobody walks past. Today you find out when someone goes down to look, and that can be an hour later. With IRIS an alert arrives while it is happening, with the camera and the point in the tunnel, and the safety officer goes down to check. This is not a report and not a sanction: it is a check.

What people usually ask

Is this used to sanction the worker who was left alone?

This is not used to sanction anyone. IRIS detects that there is a single person working in that area and raises an alert so somebody checks. It does not recognise faces, it does not know who is who and it compares nobody against any database, so it cannot point at a particular worker. Almost always the mate has stepped away for a moment, and the alert exists so that he comes back, not so that a file gets opened.

What if the mate is there but outside the frame?

If the mate is outside the frame, the alert fires anyway, which is why the rule is matched to the stretch the camera actually covers. The work area is drawn on the image, a minimum time is set — two minutes, five, whatever the procedure says — and the alert only goes out if nobody else appears in all that time. Without that minimum, the alert would fire every time someone ducks behind a machine, and within two days nobody would look at it. If the work area is longer than the frame, it takes two cameras, and that is said before anything is installed.

Does the same apply to other jobs that take two people?

The same applies to any job the procedure says must be done by two people: a confined space, a lifting operation, work at height. What changes is not the camera, it is the rule: which area is watched, how many people have to be inside it and how long you wait before alerting. That is written once with the health and safety coordinator, in plain language, and it is changed when the work changes.

Other cameras

See it for yourself

You set the rule once. IRIS applies it every time.

You will see a summary of the interface, played step by step and hands-free. Each round starts with another case. The complete tool does not fit in a demo.