Development of an IoT-Based Prototype for Optimizing Hazardous Materials and Equipment Storage to Enhance HSE in Laboratories

Laboratory incidents are often precipitated by misplacement of hazardous materials and delayed recognition of unsafe conditions. Earlier laboratory safety solutions typically centered on sensors and dashboards, including IoT monitoring, improve situational awareness but remain largely reactive, operate at room/building scale, seldom enforce item-level storage rules, and rarely report alert selectivity (false-alarm behaviour). This work presents a compact prototype that combines RFID-based storage-zone verification with environmental sensing to support Health, Safety, Security, and Environment (HSSE) compliance at the storage-unit level. An ESP32-based controller integrates three RFID readers (low/medium/high-risk compartments) with temperature humidity and gas sensors; data are streamed to an IoT interface for real-time visualization and notification (e.g., implemented via Blynk), while rule-based logic triggers local (buzzer) and remote alerts when a tagged item is placed in the wrong zone or thresholds are exceeded. A scenario-driven evaluation across 18 cases (correct/mismatched placements for representative items) yielded 100% RFID tag detection and placement validation, an average response time of 2.37 s, and no false alarms under correct placements. These results indicate that joining placement verification with multi-sensor monitoring provides selective, low-latency warnings while avoiding nuisance alerts, establishing quantitative baselines for scalable smart-laboratory HSSE enforcement.