BSBRSK501 Manage Risk

Discuss the role of risk assessment in achieving better outcomes for a project related to your discipline (eg., workers at a factory and use of cleaning chemicals, management of a particular species or ecosystem, or community members concerned about pollution from a factory).

What processes or tools would need to be incorporated into the risk assessment to ensure that risk assessment results in better decision making – for all stakeholders?

Who are the stakeholders at risk or who may have an interest - in summary, who are they and what their interest is.

Discuss how you would raise identified issues with the stakeholders to ascertain whether the risks were acceptable.

Detail a risk communication strategy to the identified stakeholders.

Wherever possible, use actual “issues” to illustrate your answers. These may be related to international events, but would need to be used in a local context.

The aim of this report is to discuss the importance of risk assessment planning in a project. This report emphasis on the risk related to the application of eye controlled wheel chair into the community and the role of risk assessment to the threats and issues that could arise in this implication. Adoption of this latest technology over the traditional wheel chair or electrical wheelchair could result the physically handicapped individuals to move to different places with just the movement of eyes. It is the most innovative technology, which is almost unknown to various sectors but have many applications (Lai et al. 2013). This will eliminate the reliability of the patients over a trainer or carer and live his or her life independently. This innovative implication has greater positive aspects but the production and application of this technology could arise several threats and risks for the stakeholders that are involved in this project. Risk assessment is very necessary for these threats and risks as explained in this report.

Eye Controlled Electric Wheel Chair

Plesnick, Repice and Loughnane (2014) presented an article on the successfully developed eye controlled electric wheel chair. Controlling wheelchair through the use of an eye tracker can be possible and how it can be achieved is demonstrated in their paper. The presented design of the wheelchair is helpful in gaining control of the wheelchair through using lots of hardware and software components in order to create an effective system. The components of the system include a laptop, an eye tracker, a DAQ, a web cam, an inverter, and lastly an electric wheelchair, which are the comprised hardware for the system. Software that are included in this system are C++ scripts and LabVIEW programs, which are used to interact with eye tracker and DAQ, and processing the data (Nguyen and Jo 2012). The eye controlled electric wheelchair is an innovative successful experiment that allows an user to access the control over the wheelchair by just moving eyes or through eye movements only and could be very helpful for the individuals who are physically disabled and help them to freely roam at places they want. Implementing this system into the real world can lead to several risks to the stakeholders related to this system.

Role of Risk Assessments

A risk can be referred as “the possibility of something happening”. In this case the term ‘risk’ can be referred as the possibility of negative outcome that might occur while, moving on the discovered chair or the injury that may be caused to the environment and the individual using this chair (Lim et al. 2013). The role of risk assessment will help in minimizing or completely eliminating following issues:

Workers at factory and cleaning chemicals

Workers at the factory or industry, where this chairs could be created may lead to certain threats and risks to the workers that are being employed there because of the chemicals that will be used for the production. Exposure standards of these chemicals represent the concentration of a mixture or a particular substance, which should not be exceeded to the environment of the industry. Basically, there are three types of the exposure standard, which can be listed as, firstly ‘8-hour time-weighted’, secondly, ‘average peak limitation’ and ‘short term exposure limit’. Exposure standard do not represent a fine line between the healthy and an unhealthy environment of work (Dixon 2015). The database of Hazardous Substances Information System (HSIS) contains guidance and additional information for many of the substances.

Management of Ecosystem and Handicapped persons

Ecosystem management aims at restoring natural resources and conserving the major ecological services while meeting the cultural, political and socioeconomic needs of the current generation as well as for the future generation. Major objectives of the ecosystem can be referred as the ethical use and efficient management of the natural resources (Simplican et al. 2015). Approaches can be made in order to achieve effective ecosystem management by engaging conservation efforts at both the landscape level or local and involves different managements, which can be listed as, natural resource management, adaptive management, command and control management, and strategic management.

Concern about Pollution of the Factory

Risk assessment can play a vital role in managing the pollution produced by the industry. The risk assessment will help in monitoring the level of the pollution that the industry is exposing to the environment and how to decompose the waste produced during the production will also be involved in this assessment system (Ongunkunle and Fatoba 2013).

Tools for the Risk Assessment

Developing a workplace profile:

It includes both object-handling and people-handling during the practice of this wheelchair. The workplace profile can be helpful in controlling in order to maximize the safety of the staff and client at the workplace. Legal responsibilities can be fulfilled by using risk control plan and workplace profile and risk (Thomas et al. 2013). This should include workplace details and the risk assessment for the workplace. Risks that need to be considered are the equipments, staffs, environment and incident reporting.

The Client Profile:

The capabilities and the action plan can be introduced in the summarize details of the client in order to create profile of the client. Client factors and characteristics that might affect the automatic movement of the individual, which should also be included in the client profile. It will provide information that are needed to make decisions about the equipments and  techniques required, including other controls that could affect the client moving and handling.

Pollution detection:

Pollution detection will lead concerns toward protecting the economy and the nature and will also protect the industry from legal actions that might affect the organization. This will include detection of the amount of waste generated, chemical exposing in the work environment and into the external environment (Kavlock et al. 2012). Proper disposal of the wastes and other harmful gases using latest technologies could help the organization to get away with the legal allegations.

Pre-launching risk assessment:

Before launching the product there should be pre-testing done for each of the product in order to check if there is any fault or something is not working. It could help both the client and the organization in being safe and saving reputation respectively.

Stakeholders

The stakeholders for this case can be listed as: User or clients that are using chair, Organization that is producing this product, donors who are funding the organization, workers that are getting employed in the industry for the production, economy where the industry is going to be established (common people) and the contractors for the raw materials and the distributors (Kenney et al. 2015). User can be considered as the highly concerned stakeholder in this case as the product will be utilized by only those users who are physically handicapped with legs and cannot move to other places. There are several risks for the user using eye tracker technology for movement. Technology cannot be completely reliable because of the defects (either manufacture defect or any software glitch) may cause vulnerability in the working of the electric chair (Kuo et al. 2013). The organization may face reputation issue if the product is launched without testing and caused problems to the users. Workers that are working may face medical problems due to the chemical used in the factory. Pollution releasing to the environment due to the waste generated and expose of toxic gases.

Risk Communication Strategy to the Identified Stakeholders

Best selection strategy can be done by following two steps which are Assessing the risk and second Gauging the risk perception of affected individuals. Stakeholder relation can be considered as small hazard and Emotional response of affected or at -risk population’s apathy (Lundgern and McMakin 2013).

Risk communication strategy can be spread among holders separately by using various latest means of communication such as, social media, blogs, newspaper and magazines (Fearn-Banks 2016). Most of the population should be covered for the communication and these are the possible mediums through which the invention of this innovative technology can be explored among the population. Personal website can be the solution for this as it would be helpful in knowing the intention of the users and demand related to the eye-tracker electric wheelchair. Community can also be informed about this by offline medium of communication, such as awareness program and training programs publicly could help in covering local communities and informing them about this technology.

Conclusion

Based on the above report it can be concluded that risk assessment is a proper technique that should be considered in every organization in order to make the project successful. Every stakeholder’s issues should be considered while managing the risk assessment in a project in order to eliminate or minimize to the extent level the identified threats and risks. Role of risk assessment has been explained in the above report that will help an individual understanding the importance of risk assessment in a project. This report covers many areas that might be affected by the implication of eye-tracking electric wheelchair.

References: 

Dixon, W.C., 2015. OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY AND HEALTH ADMINISTRATION METHODS. In Workshop on Asbestos: Definitions and Measurement Methods (p. 431).

Fearn-Banks, K., 2016. Crisis communications: A casebook approach. Routledge.

Kavlock, R., Chandler, K., Houck, K., Hunter, S., Judson, R., Kleinstreuer, N., Knudsen, T., Martin, M., Padilla, S., Reif, D. and Richard, A., 2012. Update on EPA’s ToxCast program: providing high throughput decision support tools for chemical risk management. Chemical research in toxicology, 25(7), pp.1287-1302.

Kenney, K., Huan, A., Harrington, K. and Sungkar, M., 2015. DESIGN OF AHands-FREE CONTROL SYSTEM FOR DEVICE MANIPULATION.

Kuo, W., Chien, W.T.K. and Kim, T., 2013. Reliability, yield, and stress burn-in: a unified approach for microelectronics systems manufacturing & software development. Springer Science & Business Media.

Lai, M.L., Tsai, M.J., Yang, F.Y., Hsu, C.Y., Liu, T.C., Lee, S.W.Y., Lee, M.H., Chiou, G.L., Liang, J.C. and Tsai, C.C., 2013. A review of using eye-tracking technology in exploring learning from 2000 to 2012. Educational Research Review, 10, pp.90-115.

Lim, S.S., Vos, T., Flaxman, A.D., Danaei, G., Shibuya, K., Adair-Rohani, H., AlMazroa, M.A., Amann, M., Anderson, H.R., Andrews, K.G. and Aryee, M., 2013. A comparative risk assessment of burden of disease and injury attributable to 67 risk factors and risk factor clusters in 21 regions, 1990–2010: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010. The lancet, 380(9859), pp.2224-2260.

Lundgren, R.E. and McMakin, A.H., 2013. Risk communication: A handbook for communicating environmental, safety, and health risks. John Wiley & Sons.

Nguyen, Q.X. and Jo, S., 2012. Electric wheelchair control using head pose free eye-gaze tracker. Electronics Letters, 48(13), pp.750-752.

Ogunkunle, C.O. and Fatoba, P.O., 2013. Pollution loads and the ecological risk assessment of soil heavy metals around a mega cement factory in southwest Nigeria. Polish Journal of Environmental Studies, 22(2), pp.487-493.

Plesnick, S., Repice, D. and Loughnane, P., 2014, June. Eye-controlled wheelchair. In Humanitarian Technology Conference-(IHTC), 2014 IEEE Canada International (pp. 1-4). IEEE.

Simplican, S.C., Leader, G., Kosciulek, J. and Leahy, M., 2015. Defining social inclusion of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities: An ecological model of social networks and community participation. Research in developmental disabilities, 38, pp.18-29.

Thomas, R.S., Philbert, M.A., Auerbach, S.S., Wetmore, B.A., Devito, M.J., Cote, I., Rowlands, J.C., Whelan, M.P., Hays, S.M., Andersen, M.E. and Meek, M.E., 2013. Incorporating new technologies into toxicity testing and risk assessment: moving from 21st century vision to a data-driven framework. toxicological sciences, 136(1), pp.4-18.