RFID Helps Satisfy OSHA Rules for Industrial Respirators

"I think one really nice ancillary benefit is knowing what time the maintenance was conducted," Wesley states, noting that the greatest benefit for Colden is the reduction in man-hours used by inspectors. "It saves us two to three hours a week," he adds, "which is significant."

According to Wesley, Colden purchased the three handheld readers and RFID tags for the respirators, and is paying the service fee, though he declines to reveal the cost involved.

3M's Larry Ptasienski

"The key is that RFID allows the customer to know when something is happening," Ptastenski says. The information stored on 3M's cloud-computing [Internet-based] architecture, he indicates, can be customized for the needs of a specific client. Some of 3M's respirator customers are maintenance service providers such as Colden, he notes, while others are the manufacturing sites that use the respirators themselves.

In each case, Ptastenski says, the needs for data related to inspections differ slightly. The system enables the customers to create user-defined fields—such as alerting them in advance when, for instance, an air filter cartridge needs to be changed.

Although Colden is using handheld interrogators, Ptastenski says, 3M also provides fixed pad readers that can be installed at, for example, tool cribs—such as those used by the Australian manufacturer that began testing the RFID solution in 2008. The tags and readers are provided with the data service as a retrofit kit, he adds, so that tags can be added to existing respirators. "We're excited about this system," he states. "We think this is helping our customers do their work better." Eventually, he says, 3M would also like to provide the service for other safety tools, such as hard hats and safety glasses.

Colden will provide the RFID-enabled respirator system to some of its other customers in the future as well, Wesley says, though he does not indicate how soon.