According to the U.S. Department of Labor, injuries to hands accounted for nearly 25 percent of all lost-time industrial injuries - a total of 110,000 annually. Seventy percent of those injuries resulted when an employee was not wearing safety gloves, while the other 30 percent of hand injuries occurred while an employee was wearing the wrong kind of gloves.

As a new decade rolls into our world, will there be any new significant developments in safety, particularly in hand protection that will provide an even safer work environment than the past decade?

We have gradually come to depend on cell phones and their apps for more and more information about our daily lives. The latest trend seems to be health monitoring that allows the average person to keep an eye on their vital stats. The future of hand protection is moving in much the same direction.

In considering very cheap cut-resistant gloves we may well be led to wonder, how could these supposedly hi-tech gloves be so cheap, and are they real or fake? Having been involved in the PPE glove industry for many years, I believe the truth lies somewhere in between.

We tend to think of impact work gloves as something you see on oil rigs or construction sites, where heavy duty impacts and blows are common. But almost any manufacturing process involves some type of rough work that can bump or bruise workers’ hands.

How do the standards helping to regulate North America’s PPE industry support health and safety managers tasked with keeping their teams free from harm?