The task of recognizing personal protective elements in workplace environments in real time is fundamental to protecting the employees in case of any accidents. This can be achieved by deploying a convolutional neural network (CNN) algorithm that can efficiently detect protective elements through surveillance devices. Therefore, this work proposes the construction of a model, implementing the you only look once (YOLO) detector, whose architecture has been one of the most tested according to literature review. YOLOv5 and YOLOv7 versions were used and a dataset of 2,000 images for four classes considered. This dataset was collection from various sources and labelled by the authors, of which 80% was used for training, 15% for testing and 5% for model validation. The most important metrics are presented, making a comparison between the models, and finally it was identified that YOLOv7 achieved a higher success rate, which could be considered a more complete solution for occupational health and safety management in companies.