Computerized compliance of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) is an emerging topic in academic literature that aims to enhance workplace safety through the automation of compliance and prevention of PPE misuse (which currently relies on manual employee supervision and reporting). Although trends in the scientific literature indicate a high potential for solving the compliance problem by employing computer vision (CV) techniques, the practice has revealed a series of barriers that limit their wider applications. This article aims to contribute to the advancement of CV-based PPE compliance by providing a comparative review of high-level approaches, algorithms, datasets, and technologies used in the literature. The systematic review highlights industry-specific challenges, environmental variations, and computational costs related to the real-time management of PPE compliance. The issues of employee identification and identity management are also discussed, along with ethical and cybersecurity concerns. Through the concept of CV-based PPE Compliance 4.0, which encapsulates PPE, human, and company spatio-temporal variabilities, this study provides guidelines for future research directions for addressing the identified barriers. The further advancements and adoption of CV-based solutions for PPE compliance will require simultaneously addressing human identification, pose estimation, object recognition and tracking, necessitating the development of corresponding public datasets.
As the world moves into the exciting age of Healthcare 4.0, it is essential that patients and clinicians have confidence and reassurance that the real-time clinical decision support systems being used throughout their care guarantee robustness and optimal quality of care. However, current systems involving autonomic behaviour and those with no prior clinical feedback, have generally to date had little focus on demonstrating robustness in the use of data and final output, thus generating a lack of confidence. This paper wishes to address this challenge by introducing a new process mining approach based on a statistically robust methodology that relies on the utilisation of conditional survival models for the purpose of evaluating the performance of Healthcare 4.0 systems and the quality of the care provided. Its effectiveness is demonstrated by analysing the performance of a clinical decision support system operating in an intensive care setting with the goal to monitor ventilated patients in real-time and to notify clinicians if the patient is predicted at risk of receiving injurious mechanical ventilation. Additionally, we will also demonstrate how the same metrics can be used for evaluating the patient quality of care. The proposed methodology can be used to analyse the performance of any Healthcare 4.0 system and the quality of care provided to the patient.