Elaboration of an Open Source Prototyping Platform for Salubrity Monitoring in Agricultural Machinery

Abstract

Agricultural operations are generally carried out in places subject to abrupt environmental changes. In order to provide improvements in the work environment of tractor operators, it is of the utmost importance to monitor and make changes in the work environment. The present work aims to elaborate a low cost, flexible and easy to handle prototype, geared towards monitoring some parameters associated with the salubrity conditions of the agricultural tractor operator’s working environment, which are: sound pressure level, ambient temperature and relative air humidity. The developed prototype acquire data through low-cost sensors and interprets the analyzed parameters comparing their values ​​to those recommended by the Brazilian Regulatory Standards 15 (Unhealthy Operations and Activities) and 17 (Ergonomics), in order to perform a salubrity analysis of the local environmental conditions and to issue visual alerts to the operator when any parameter is outside the range of interest. Industrial reference equipment, such as a decibel meter and a thermo hygrometer, were used in order to calibrate the sensors, which are responsible for monitoring the above-mentioned parameters. For purposes of precision evaluation, the data acquired by both systems (sensors and the reference equipment) were subjected to the Tukey test at a 5% significance level (P < 0.05). It was concluded that the elaborated prototype is effective to monitor cab temperature, relative air humidity and noise level. Also, it has potential for deepening in the monitoring of continuous and intermittent noise and calculation of the dose of noise on the operator throughout his/her working day. In addition, the prototype proved to be successful due to its low-cost (88.6USD), fast data acquisition, flexibility and relatively simple assembly and operating methodology. The prototype’s code is available in the GitHub platform.