Executive Summary
Farm workers are key elements to the United States economy. Currently there are numerous regulations to protect farm worker’s rights and appropriate working conditions. However, many farm workers experience denial of basic rights, exploitation, and oftentimes are exposed to unsafe work conditions. Our team envisions to design a system that is able to inform farm workers of their rights, their health conditions during regular work time, gather data for OSHA and for their employers on a daily basis. To do this, we will redesign our own monitoring system that farm workers will wear only during work hours with adequate privacy protection, below the overview design for our Monitoring system.
Monitoring system
One of the components is a water proof touch screen mobile computer with an easy mounting mechanism. The mobile computer is intended to track time worked by employer as well as displaying real time data (heart rate, calories burned, hydration, body temperature, and other applicable information), and alerts. The crew leader(s) should be available to see the monitor and receive alerts. However, since crew leaders may ignore the conditions of the workers, information will be sent to OSHA if hydration or temperature levels are considered unhealthy and the crew leader has not taken actions to assist the worker. The computer should be able to track and record the time worked by sliding a magnetic card who will be assigned to every employer (some employers are familiar with this system already). The employee would be requested by crew leader to slide the card at the start and end of shift and lunch period. The system would detect lunch time violations. In addition, at the end of shift system would ask employer to confirm if all the appropriate breaks were taken maintaining a degree of confidentiality. If the systems detects any lunch/break violation then would result alerting the farm owner as well as a notification to the proper office.
Monitoring Device A Fantastic-3 wearable (wearable device similar to Fitbit that tracks temperature, GPS, hydration levels, etc.) would be used for monitoring the vitals of the farm worker. The Bluetooth technology would remain the same. A possible wrist strap and protection case could be developed for durability. The device will display information in Spanish and English.
Team Lead Our team leader is Juan Lopez Marcano, he is a graduate student at Virginia Tech. We are a group of three members, Juan Lopez Marcano will be the team lead and product design manager. Salvador Cortes and Gerardo Toledo will be in charge of the software, and program implementation.
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