Design and Implementation of a Hybrid BLE Mesh–LoRa Smart Safety Helmet System for Port Logistics Environments

Industrial worksites, such as construction, manufacturing, and logistics environments, are characterized by high-risk working conditions, requiring safety management systems capable of monitoring workers' safety status in real time and responding promptly to accidents.Conventional safety helmets primarily focus on physical protection and have limitations in detecting helmet-wearing status, recognizing accidents, and identifying worker locations.To address these gaps, this paper presents the design and implementation of a smart safety helmet system that combines BLE Mesh and LoRa communication for port logistics environments.Specifically, the proposed system integrates helmet-wearing detection, impact detection, and GPS-based location tracking into a single helmet device, enabling real-time collection and transmission of workers' safety status.The helmet device is built on an ESP32-S3 microcontroller and incorporates an RFID/NFC module, an accelerometergyroscope sensor, and a GPS module.Experimental results show that the helmet-wearing detection accuracy exceeded 95%, and the average data transmission latency from impact event detection to the server was within 1 second.Addionally, stable LoRa communication was achieved at distances of up to approximately 1.2 km, further validating the system's reach.These results collectively demonstrate the practical applicability of the proposed smart safety helmet system for safety management in port logistics industrial environments.Unlike prior smart helmet systems that focus on isolated functions or single-network communication, this work demonstrates an integrated, field-oriented architecture combining BLE Mesh and LoRa to support scalable, event-driven safety monitoring in port logistics environments.Nevertheless, the current prototype evaluation is limited to short-term experiments;