With 29 years of experience as a respiratory protection specialist, Reggie Naicken is acutely aware of the many challenges that workers face on the shop floor. Foremost of which is ensuring that all workers understand the risks associated with their specific environment, that they are provided with the correct PPE and work wear to protect them in that environment and finally monitoring compliance to ensure that the equipment issued is used correctly. Here, Reggie explains how this led to the development of a voice amplifier for respiratory protection to help improve workers safety.
The first step in ensuring workers safety is to conduct a comprehensive risk assessment, the aim of which is to identify all the health and safety risks associated with a particular environment. This will help the safety officer and leadership team to then specify the correct work wear and PPE to protect their workers. Once the workers have been issued with the correct work wear and PPE for their specific environment, compliance is extremely important. Workers need to be trained on the importance of wearing their PPE and how to use it correctly and consistently.
One of the biggest challenges that workers face on the shop floor is their ability to communicate effectively and safely while wearing either a half or full-face piece respirator. This is a global challenge for workers and while some communication devices have been developed to address it, the majority of these units are designed for first responders, swat, fire or special military units with SCBA that utilise radio communication and a Full- Face Respirator. However, very few devices have been developed for ambient applications that cater effectively for large workforces, who need to communicate effectively on the shop floor each day.
When wearing a standard respirator, safe communication is challenging for workers because the respirator muffles the user’s speech making it difficult for them to be heard or understood. To overcome this challenge many employees will often compromise their personal safety by lifting, removing, pulling or dropping their respirator so that they can be heard. This leaves them exposed to toxic air borne substances in a respirator zoned body shop or shop floor. Removing their respiratory protection is a safety violation and can lead to illness, chronic health issues and even death depending on the length of exposure to the polluted air.
This is an important health and safety issue and one that Reggie was determined to address and so after taking early retirement, he decided, with the support of his wife and children, to start work developing a solution to address this problem. It was a challenging journey to develop an amplification device but after 3 600 hours and 15 months, he finally had a successful prototype and after further testing and development was granted patent in 2019.
The amplification device seamlessly integrates with respirators to clearly project the users voice, enabling effective communication without them having to remove their mask. This innovation is a South African first and will revolutionise communication on the shop floor while improving compliance, increasing wear time and most importantly protecting the workforce. The range of voice amplification devices will be launched in October 2025 and be available with the Dromex DH-302 range and the Dromex full face respirator DH-FFM.
Dromex understands that the men and women who use our products work in tough and uncompromising environments and so all our products are designed and tested to the highest international technical and quality standards. We take our responsibility to protect workers seriously and have a team of experienced technical product specialists in workwear, footwear, fall arrest, respiratory, gloves, hearing, head and eye protection that provide risk assessments to help businesses understand how to better protect their workers. This service is part of Dromex commitment to championing improved safety for workers and so is provided free of charge with no obligation.
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