Riley LED lenses improve eye fatigue
and reduce costs for Nissan workers
Operating in 13 markets with 29 facilities, worker safety at Nissan is especially important with over 133,000 employees worldwide. Working within the automotive sector, employees are exposed to various high risk tasks, making effective, comfortable, and high-performing PPE a necessity for Nissan.
The Situation
As workers in Nissan factories and assembly centres were spending long periods of time in brightly-lit environments, eye protection was a vital part of Nissan's PPE offering. LED and strip lighting are common within the automotive industry to give workers high-visibility when performing complex handling tasks. Although necessary for intricate tasks, these environments can be detrimental to employee's eye health, often causing fatigue, stress, and tiredness to the eye.
Nissan's initial solution to this was to provide workers with mirrored eyewear, to reflect the LED lighting from the eye, helping to reduce eye fatigue. Although this seemed like a viable solution, there were a few issues with the mirrored safety eyewear.
Primarily, operators were unable to make eye contact with other employees when driving forklift trucks, due to the opaque mirrored lenses. This meant that supervisors were unable to verify that operators of these heavy vehicles were alert when working, reducing safety standards and allowing a more accident-prone environment. Furthermore, the mirrored lenses being used were prone to fogging on the outside of the lens. As employees are frequently moving from indoor to outdoor environments and between humidity levels, eyewear fogging can lead to a serious hazard of obstructing vision and could cause eyewear to be removed, exposing workers to other hazards such as flying debris, dust, and liquid splash.
The Solution
A solution was needed to address both the eye fatigue caused by LED strip lighting, and the hinderances of mirrored lenses. Working with a Globus representative, the Riley LED lens was developed to add a pigment to the standard Riley polycarbonate lens. Designed to improve contrast and reduce stress to the eye, the lens is ideal for indoor LED lit environments such vehicle manufacture and engineering sectors. Riley's LED lens features a soothing light brown tint, offering full clarity with a high visible light transmission percentage. The LED lens is also available across a range of Riley frames, enabling an inclusive solution for an array of tasks and hazardous situations.