Thousands of workers die in industrial accidents each year in the U.S. and more than 100,000 suffer from non-fatal work-related injuries. Workers, employers, and insurance companies collectively face billions of dollars of direct and indirect costs due to industrial accidents. We wrote about StrongArm’s Fuse Platform that uses IoT sensors to monitor worker movements in order to reduce risk. DAQRI Smart Glasses use augmented reality to highlight dangerous areas and signal threatening conditions in factories.
AI-based worker safety solution company Everguard.ai recently announced Sentri360, an end-to-end platform that alerts workers and management to safety hazards. In its application for steel mills, for example, Sentri360 uses PPE Detector computer vision, fall detection, safety zone compliance, proximity warnings, and cobbling detection. Cobbling is a process fault in which a tangled mass of steel gets hung up in the rolling mill process and creates a highly dangerous molten mass. Data from the varied sensors feed into predictive artificial intelligence algorithms. The benefit of prediction with dangerous conditions allows time to alert management to the threat and warn workers to be safe.
The Sentri360 platform provides the opportunity for proactive action to avoid accidents, injuries, and deaths. In addition to reducing human suffering in the workplace, Sentri360 helps employers achieve greater profitability with fewer manufacturing interruptions and production shutdowns. From a wider perspective, the system shows how non-contact solutions can perform many monitoring tasks that are often assigned to wearable devices. This can have broad implications for health and medical applications, such as remote patient monitoring.
