Monitoring people and conditions inside confined spaces.
Founding Minds developed Sando Guardian, an industrial IoT system combining wearable sensors, proximity-based location monitoring, and environmental measurements to give safety teams better visibility into confined-space operations aboard ships and offshore structures.
The situation
Shipping and offshore engineering run on confined-space work: tanks, holds, voids, and machinery spaces. At any moment, many workers across a yard or a vessel are inside structures that are difficult to enter, difficult to see into, and hazardous by nature.
That creates two visibility problems. The first is worker visibility: knowing who has entered a confined space, where they are, and whether they have left. The second is environmental visibility: monitoring the conditions inside the space. Safety officers have traditionally relied on a permit board and a headcount.
What made it hard
Positioning inside steel structures.
A confined space inside a steel structure is a difficult setting for wireless communication: enclosed metal, limited line of sight, and little supporting infrastructure. Metal surfaces attenuate and reflect signals, so positioning had to be designed around those conditions.
Low-power, practical wearables.
A worker carries the device through a shift, so power consumption, size, and durability matter alongside what it measures. Frequent charging is not practical, which rules out many of the obvious approaches to continuous tracking.
Dependable environmental measurement.
The tag measures temperature, humidity, and volatile organic compound (VOC) concentration. Thresholds, calibration, and alert behavior need care, and VOC readings are one input alongside the checks that confined-space work already requires.
Information that safety officers can use.
The software has to turn location and environmental readings into an operational view that can be read without interpretation: who is present, entry and exit history, and current readings. It also has to avoid adding friction to every entry, or it risks being bypassed.
What was built
An industrial IoT monitoring system, in three functional parts.
Wearable sensor tag
Carried by the worker. Uses a Bluetooth Low Energy beacon to support low-power, proximity-based positioning, and measures temperature, humidity, and VOC concentration.
Position and presence information
Uses proximity information to indicate which part of a structure a worker is near, supporting visibility into occupied spaces and into entry and exit.
Operational monitoring software
Presents worker presence, environmental readings, and event history to safety personnel.
BLE offers low power consumption and short range, which suit proximity-based positioning. Enclosed steel structures still limit and distort wireless signals, and the design had to account for that. Proximity indicates where a worker is relative to known points, not an exact location.
Sando Guardian is an additional source of information. It supplements established confined-space procedures and does not replace permits, atmospheric testing, or trained emergency response.
What changed
A clearer picture of confined-space activity
Sando Guardian brings worker-presence information, environmental readings, and entry-and-exit history into a monitoring interface for safety personnel. It provides an additional source of operational information about occupied confined spaces.
The engineering decision that mattered
Monitoring workers inside steel structures required balancing communication constraints, low-power wearable hardware, environmental sensing, and usable operational software. The solution was shaped by the physical environment and by the needs of the people responsible for monitoring it.