Safety Standard Innovation

Overview

Safety is a preventative thing, it is something to do to prevent harm to occur. However, what is considered to be safe for one person, is definitely not for another. One of the key items to employ is using "standards"

Bigger and Bigger Factor of Safety Doesn't FEEL "Safe"

In my past experience, i kept being asked if i can have higher factor of safety. If something has FOS 1.4, someone may ask to raise to 1.5, if i have 1.5, someone would want to raise to 2.0, if i have 2.0, someone may ask for 3.0....someone can have higher and higher "requirement". This is natural for management to be "more safe"

However, this is not always the case. Let's say i have a robotic arm overhead that has 3 joints and 50kg design to have fatigue 1.6 FOS with high static FOS. Increase the FOS to 5.0 will need to make the first joint about more than 3x more weight, with 3x more weight, the actuator may need to size up a few models, the secondary joint may therefore need to support 6x-10x more weight, the final joint may need to size up the actuator and weight as well. The final product 20x-40x more weight than the original weight. Let's say for someone walking around it, will the person feel more safety walking around a 50kg of arm, or 1000kg of arm?

Safety of feeling is very tricky.

Strategy

Sometimes, the simplest solution is to stick to a standards, employing secondary safety. Most of the time, this is sufficient. Adding sensors, human monitoring systems can also make this much better. Standards are there because there has been past experience to proof something is safety under the said condition. Trusting that is much better than unreasonable feelings.