Companies in the oil and gas industries operate in environments that carry inescapable hazards. Oil and gas extraction involves large, powerful machinery often operating in inaccessible areas such assubterranean mines or deep-water sites. The sound levels in these environments commonly require the use of hearing protection, and the air may fill with combustible fumes or dust. This combination of hazards requires specialized technology for workers to perform safely. One such technology is the hand-held tablet.
Tablets provide low-cost computing power that’s light enough to be carried in the field by any worker. The versatility of tablet systems allows a wider array of work to be done on the fly, and provides a secondary channel of communications on the ground. They can be used with cloud services to protect against data loss, and while it’s true they can be damaged, so can the technology that they are replacing— which often consists of pen and paper.