Laboratory work involves its share of risks, ranging from repetitive strain injuries to pathogen exposures. These issues remain stubbornly common, with as many as 45% of workers risking exposure to hazardous materials at one academic institution. In general, laboratory accidents are likely to be underreported. Reports like these highlight the need for action, because like any workplace, a lab’s productivity and long-term success depends on keeping workers safe and healthy.
Incorporating automation into laboratory processes can provide transformative improvements to lab safety standards. Fundamentally, workers in an automated lab have less contact with potentially hazardous substances and equipment. However, lab safety and automation also work synergistically: by reducing human error in labs, supporting standardized workflows, and facilitating data-based improvements to lab processes, lab automation helps build safer and more productive protocols over the long term.
Common Safety Issues That Occur Within Labs
While safety risks are specific to each lab, the following concerns pose dangers to many labs:
- Repetitive strain injuries from manual tasks, especially pipetting
- Exposure to hazardous substances, either chemicals or pathogens
- Accidents related to equipment failure, such as centrifuges
- Human errors that lead to contamination or other accidents
How to Improve Lab Safety With Automaton
Minimizing Exposure to Hazardous Substances
Improving laboratory safety is possible by minimizing human contact with hazardous substances through automation. In many cases, this means employing liquid handling systems to prepare samples in bulk, which would otherwise require many repeated human-involved steps. For instance, a high-throughput semi-automated system can process and test blood samples for signatures of tuberculosis, thereby reducing the chance that human workers become exposed.
Many labs deal with hazardous substances as part of their core function, and this isn’t going to change. However, with automation, human workers have less risk to their health, whether from chemical substances with a known risk profile or while testing samples that may contain pathogens.
Increasingly flexible robotic systems, including robotic arms and mobile robots, can transport materials between workcells and fill the gaps between workflow steps. Lab orchestration and scheduling software makes it easier than ever to design automated workflows for the specific needs of any lab.
Decreasing Risk from Equipment Failure
Unfortunately, even the best laboratory equipment eventually fails, but automated solutions can simplify and facilitate machine upkeep by automatically monitoring equipment functionality.
Ubiquitous machines like centrifuges can produce a great deal of mechanical force, posing a danger to workers. Others use heating elements that could potentially cause fires. In an automated lab, human workers have less direct contact with potentially dangerous equipment, reducing the chance that someone is hurt if the equipment fails.
The best way to prevent catastrophic equipment failure is through regular maintenance, which ensures that any malfunctioning part or machine is repaired or replaced before it poses a safety risk. Lab orchestration software helps further ensure that data on equipment functionality is recorded and centrally available. This allows equipment malfunctions to be detected and dealt with earlier, protecting both lab workers and laboratory operations.
Reducing Human Error in Laboratory Processes
While human errors can pose a grave risk to lab safety, automation reduces the probability of these mistakes. Incorporating automation into lab operations, both through robotic equipment as well as lab scheduling and orchestration software, allows for standardized workflows where tasks are reliably performed the same way, every time.
Repetitive, high-precision sample preparation tasks like liquid handling bring humans into close proximity with substances that may be dangerous to their health. Each step in the process poses the risk of accidental exposure through errors in sample handling.
Exposure can occur directly, through personal protection equipment malfunction, or indirectly through cross-contamination of samples. When cross-contamination occurs, workers may not know they are handling dangerous materials, increasing the possibility of further exposure.
Compared to humans, automated solutions like liquid handlers are much less likely to make pipetting errors, switch samples, or mislabel them, reducing the probability of accidental exposures.
An added benefit of automation is that when errors become less frequent, the need for re-processing samples is reduced, boosting both operational efficiency and preventing the need for additional human contact with samples.
Data Analysis to Avoid Repeat Incidents
One of the greatest safety benefits of lab automation comes from the capture of rich operational datasets. Automated equipment is built with sensors that can detect environmental conditions as well as anomalies in functionality, while data services ensure that these important records are stored centrally and can be used to finetune lab operations.
This way, when a safety incident occurs, there is a log of what processes were being run at the time, as well as information about equipment performance and laboratory conditions at that moment. This data can be invaluable for reconstructing the factors that produced a safety incident, crucial for designing better operational safeguards to prevent repeat incidents.
Enhancing Laboratory Safety Protocols
Building automation into a lab’s workflow is an opportunity to support worker compliance with safety protocols, helping maintain a safe and productive lab.
We all know that people can sometimes become distracted and occasionally forget to follow lab safety rules to the letter. Systems like Biosero’s Green Button Go Workflow Designer and Lab Experience tools can help automate lab safety procedures. Lab workers can maintain higher safety standards by incorporating relevant notifications and protocol reminders into lab operations.
The Green Button Go Lab Orchestrator software helps bridge the gaps between each piece of equipment in the workflow and workers. These systems can automatically check whether necessary protocol steps have been completed before allowing the process to progress. Together, these systems minimize deviations and prevent accidents.
As labs acquire larger logs of sensor data, opportunities for data-based insights on lab processes increase. These records help labs continually improve their processes and prioritize safety.
The Future of Lab Safety
Safety and automation are integrally linked in the modern lab, supporting robust and productive operations without interruption.
Software is a key piece of any automated system. Biosero’s Green Button Go software and custom drivers integrate devices and workflows, regardless of your lab’s configuration or hardware needs. Central control over automated systems and all the data they produce is the best way to minimize workplace accidents while ensuring safety protocols evolve along with research operations.
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