Artificial intelligence and blockchain-based inspection data recording system for portable firefighting equipment

Abstract

Fire poses an enormous threat to human safety; many people get injured or die due to fire accidents each year. As permanent firefighting equipment usually available in a build building, they do not exist in many construction job sites, so they merely depend upon the portable firefighting equipment (PFE) to keep the fire damage limited and minimum. To ensure the proper functionality of the PFE in the case of fire, perfectly located and in-good order are the two vital factors for the PFE. According to standards specified by safety regulations, PFE inspection and maintenance are required to ensure the perfect location and good order of the PFE. Currently, the PFE inspection and maintenance includes the safety auditor from the government and safety manager from the concerned companies. Moreover, the PFE inspection and maintenance process depends on the paper-based manual reporting and recording system, which is time-consuming, cumbersome, and can be easily manipulated. To automate the process of PFE inspection and maintenance, this study will propose optical character recognition (OCR) and Blockchain-based reporting and recording system. A mobile application is developed to validate the proof of concept. One of the artificial intelligence techniques, the optical character recognition (OCR) is adopted in the mobile application, which automatically converts the image tag or report of the PFE inspection and maintenance to the text. The text data is encrypted in a hash using encryption scheme SHA 256 of online service with open API, named as truetimestamp. The generated hash will signify the date inside of the file, which will be immutable and incorruptible. Moreover, the coordinates of the captured image will be extracted from the device to ensure the location of the PFE. It is expected that the proposed system will decrease the paperwork, reduce the burden of the safety manager, with increased efficiency and reliability of the PFE inspection records. The collected inspection record data could also be used to evaluate the safety performance of the concerned contractors. © 2020 Proceedings of the 37th International Symposium on Automation and Robotics in Construction, ISARC 2020: From Demonstration to Practical Use - To New Stage of Construction Robot. All rights reserved.