Digital Worker: the 21st Century's Guardian of Occupational Safety
Digital Worker is a solution inspired by Vision Zero. Despite being young, it started to gain popularity on the market, being richly equipped with user-friendly technologies. People keep asking me about this development, so I decided to answer the most common questions and cover the key points of Digital Worker using simple language.
What is Digital Worker?
To put it simply, it is a solution designed to supervise compliance with occupational health and safety rules in hazardous areas of manufacturing and construction facilities. In fact, we command a computer to watch that everyone wears proper protective equipment (PPE), different zoning rules depending on the environment as a simple example and add more complex cases when required.
Moreover, you can configure it to watch any manufacturing machinery or moving objects, like a loading machine, that can cause injury to an employee. Once the distance between a machine and an individual is close to unsafe, Digital Worker alerts people of the danger.
This power of supervision over rules compliance, PPE usage, restricted area access control, and physical hazard risk management grants a manufacturing facility, dare I say it, "consciousness".
You have my curiosity, but it all sounds like science fiction. I would never entrust a machine with my life. For my peace of mind, I would choose a human to be responsible for occupational safety.
Occupational safety is above all a duty to oneself. There are rules to follow and PPE to protect them. To be honest, no one will ever know if those rules are violated, unless caught in the act or ran into serious trouble. A shift supervisor or foreman can always keep an eye on your employees, but let's be real, when there are thousands of people working at a site, watching every single one of them is mission impossible.
This brings us to the main reason behind the majority of accidents: you never can really tell. Details are usually revealed post mortem, after something bad has happened, and people respond with delay, loosing precious minutes. Digital Worker acts proactively: the system sees, for example, a person entering a hazardous area without a protective suit and immediately alerts to the danger, unlike an ordinary supervisor, who realizes that an employee is missing when it's too late – thirty minutes from disappearing to starting to search and ask questions.
How does your systems know that someone got hurt?
There are two ways to get this information:
- Video cameras. The system analyzes video streams from cameras around your facility and recognizes events. We offer different modules for certain events depending on the specifics of work: PPE usage, zoning (hazardous and safe), incident detection (smoke, fire).
- Sensors of various types that we install on moving objects.
You say that this system recognizes various types of PPE: hard hats, gloves, and so on. But what if I am to cheat it? Or, say, a worker forgot to putt a hard hat on and hanged it on the belt, what then? The system sees the employee and the hard hat together, so assumes it's okay. And the next thing you see is a beam falling on the employee's head.
You can't fool the system that way, since it checks specifically, whether a particular piece of PPE is on the corresponding part of the body. A hard hat in a hand, on a belt, or anywhere else, except for the head, where it belongs, is registered as a violation to trigger an alarm.
What if such a complex solution is too expensive in terms of labor and money?
At first sight, this seems expensive, but occupational accidents statistics shows a number of insights like the injury rate. According to some data, manufacturing and construction enterprises might have as much as 7% per year (that is 7 out of 100 employees are injured every year). Furthermore, such accidents can affect not only a person with treatment bills to pay, but also can result in downtime of an entire manufacturing enterprise, which often involves equipment damage. Thus, we have: treatment costs downtime equipment repair. These expenses exceed manifold the cost of Digital Worker, which can proactively detect and prevent violations, thus making your production facility safer for employees. Technological advantages have become affordable, easy to implement, and capable of bringing you closer to Vision Zero.
What about Digital Worker case studies?
After a number of successful pilot projects this proven solution has made big entry on the market, and its sales just took off. Let's take a look at some of the pilot projects:
- Mining and chemical industry. Digital Worker accelerates management response to emergencies and strategic decision-making, detects personnel performance degradation and identifies its causes, reduces idle time, accidents, related expenses, etc.
- Oil and gas transport ships. Video analytics on cargo ships detects PPE, men overboard, and headcount on decks. A ship captain has mobile interface to receive alerts and can see the video stream in real time.
- Oil terminal construction site. The system rolled out on oil terminal construction site tracks 200 people at once, supervising contractors' performance on site and monitor personnel headcount and presence as well.
So, you're saying a worker, a digital worker. Does that mean that your solution will replace people?
No, of course not. This solution is meant to help people handling occupational accidents. Human errors resulting from poor attention or fatigue are now backed up by artificial intelligence. The system captures any violation and displays a pop-up notification to a safety officer with a screenshot/video file of the event enabling immediate action, instead of sitting around and waiting for an incident to happen. The person at the surveillance desk has a handy tool with dashboards, reports, and automatic alerts that can dramatically improve efficiency.
The world is full of different manufacturing facilities. How do you adapt your solution to them? Is it versatile?
That's the beauty of Digital Worker. It is a platform with a set of modules that can be customized to specifics customer's business and particular production processes. Moreover, if a unique manufacturing facility requires a unique new module then our experts can develop it.