Jump Detection Wearable Could Lead to Fewer Workplace Accidents
Wearable tech company Kinetic has provided one of the latest ways that technology is being used to keep us safer. Their belt-mounted safety device now includes a useful jump detection feature that lets users understand when they're carrying out potentially dangerous activities.
The Full Story
The wearable sensor produced by Kinetic has previously been used to help workers avoid things like bending, overreaching, and twisting. It works by altering the wearer to danger, when it's detected, by vibrating. They've now added an extra feature to it, that alerts workers to the fact that they're carrying out high-risk jumping activities.
As well as letting them see the potential dangers of their present actions through real-time feedback, the sensor also tracks the activity the wearer carries out, looking for trends that they should notice. This information can then be used to allow the company to understand the activities they need to focus their future training on.
They state that the jump detection feature could help to lower workplace injury rates by up to 50%. Haytham Elhawary is the co-founder and CEO of Kinetic, and he said that their updated device could now help to reduce the number of injuries commonly incurred in activities like jumping off a truck or ladder. The company's stated goal is to wipe out one million industrial workforce-related injuries in the next decade.
The Impact of Injuries at Work
Jump-related injuries are believed to be among the most types of workplace accidents, although it's difficult to find exact figures for how common they are and what the overall cost is. Work-related injury statistics generally look at categories such as falls, trips, and collisions, but jumping could be involved in more than one of these categories.
However, the Kinetic website has a series of use cases where we can see the overall impact of their technology in helping companies to keep their employees safer. Among them is the story of how a group of 500 workers were divided into two groups, with the group that used the Kinetic device suffering 62% fewer accidents and injuries over the 12-month trial period.
Other use cases listed on their site include those from major companies such as Frito-Lay and PepsiCo. Workers are encouraged to use the wearables through their goal and reward functions, while the employer gets a summary of the most important data in a cloud-based dashboard format that allows them to analyze their results and focus on areas to be improved.
In terms of employee health, jump-related accidents can lead to serious injury and a lengthy spell of work. Anyone who suffers in this way is likely to look into the subject of compensation for personal injury claims, which is where a solicitor helps a plaintiff to claim from a defendant because their actions or negligence led to the injury. It typically takes between nine and 15 months to resolve one of these cases, although this timescale can vary greatly.
This is just one of the interesting ways that technology is being used to make workplaces safer. While it seems unlikely that we eliminate all risk of workplace injuries, every new advance of this type helps to keep us a little safer and protect businesses from the cost of accidents.