Enhancing Workplace Health & Safety Using Computer Vision

- Subhash Sharma 

Although health and safety at workplaces have improved over the years, yet the UK continues to have a large number of workplace accidents. The number of accidents resulting in injury, or in some cases, even death is quite high. Many of these accidents can be avoided, and AI-based computer vision can play a significant role in cutting down these accidents. 

Health and Safety Statistics. Key figures for Great Britain (2018/19)

• 1.4 million working people suffering from a work-related illness
• 2,526 mesothelioma deaths due to past asbestos exposures (2017)
• 147 workers killed at work
• 581,000 working people sustaining an injury at work according to the Labour Force Survey
• 69,208 injuries to employees reported under RIDDOR
• 28.2 million working days lost due to work-related illness and workplace injury
• £15 billion estimated costs of injuries and ill health from current working conditions (2017/18)

( Source: https://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/ )
Forklifts alone account for 1,300 UK employees being hospitalised each year (That’s 5 UK workers each workday!) with serious injuries due to these accidents. Unfortunately, that number is rising as there is a significant growth in e-commerce and warehouses across the UK. 

Use of AI-based computer vision for optimising workplace health and safety in the UK.

Our Computer Vision product, IRIS, is an AI-based computer vision solution to track and predict workplace accidents and then prevent them from happening. The existing use cases include:

• Fork Lift Safety, Predicting and Prevention of Fork Lift accidents.
• Use of Lifting Equipment
• Work at Height
• Fire & Thermal injuries and accidents
• Machine Guarding
• Manual Handling
• Monitoring near misses and reporting near misses & accidents in real-time
• Monitoring Use of PPE

IRIS is an enterprise computer vision solution. The product is currently deployed at many customer sites including Fortune 500 companies. The AI solution sits on the top of existing CCTV infrastructure. It is very cost-effective and can be deployed quickly either at a customer site or through the cloud. 

Get in touch with us to know how we can make workplace safer for your employees.

The Next Big thing: Post COVID-19 Workplaces

- Apoorva Verma

Pic: Freepik

The economy cannot survive a lockdown mode forever and the vaccine for COVID-19 may take years to develop and market, ‘unlock 1.0’ had become the necessary evil. This puts the responsibility on organizations, irrespective of their size, to focus on making the workplace safer for employees. 

 

This pandemic has changed the fundamental aspects of professional lives — from the daily commute to work environment to interactions amongst colleagues and peers. Hygiene and safety concerns are here to stay and will probably remain for at least a year from now or even more. 

 

Consequently, businesses are re-accessing their business models and working on best practices to follow on restarting operations. Thus, they are looking at:

 

1.    Ensuring compliance: what will be the best practices for floor management in a post-COVID-19 workplace? Face masks, sanitizer, gloves, and face shields are the new survival kits. Social distancing is being jacked up and automation solutions have seen a jump owing to the difficulty in ensuring these social distancing norms. 

 

2.    Hygiene: Can they deploy contactless technology wherever possible and emphasize on frequent sanitization in high-touch places?

 

3.    Accelerated technology adoption: Each sector has different requirements and use of advanced technologies such as AI and IIOT can help manage operations better. 

 

Returning back to work will require efforts and everyone needs to be vigilant. The world is at a stage where people can’t afford to be lackadaisical in their approach. Organisations are looking for long-term solutions to enforce safety compliance, especially in workplace environments where thousands work together. 

 

Computer vision technology solution trained for detecting compliance such as IRIS AI, by Integration Wizards, is ensuring face mask and social distancing compliance for organisations. It works on any existing CCTV network and identifies cases of social distancing or face mask violations and sends real-time alerts to the relevant authority. A dashboard provides detailed analytics for a given time period. In addition, using face recognition technology, their newly launched attendance app – LogMyFace, is a contactless attendance solution. 

 

Change is perpetual. But sometimes, it is the only option. As the world around us is changing, it has provided us with a new canvas. It is time to paint a new picture. 

Get in touch to discover the best compliance solution for your business. 

Competing in the Age of AI

-Apoorva Verma

How machine intelligence is changing the rules of business and what should companies do to stay on top? 

Pic: Freepik

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a branch of computer science that makes it possible for machines to learn from experience, adjust to new inputs and perform human-like tasks.

According to IDC, companies are forecast to spend $98 billion on AI, globally in 2023. This stems from the fact that more and more businesses continue to invest in projects that utilise the capabilities of AI software and platforms. For example, most companies have turned to chatbots or automated customer service agents for their customer services.

In the current scenario, the world is grappling with a global pandemic, the COVID-19. This has forced most of the countries into lockdown and changed the way businesses function. The role of AI has now become more important than ever.

We are in a phase where AI is realising its potential in achieving human-like capabilities, so isn’t it time to question the business leaders on how they can harness the strength of man and machine.

With technologies such as deep learning, IoT, computer vision and language processing, machines have learnt how to speak, read, text, identify patterns, and so much more. As this field precipitates more into commonly manual activities, for example, the use of AI to combat the corona pandemic in many countries such as training the AI to recognise a positive case using the Chest X-Ray or using drone cameras for thermal screenings.

THE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE:

Rather than scrapping the traditional methods of competitive advantage, AI reframes them in such a manner that companies can get a dynamic view of their strengths. For example, the health and safety of company employees were traditionally dependent on manual hours of patrolling security, it then moved to long hours of video feed monitoring from multiple cameras. However, humans are prone to error due to fatigue or negligence.

So, how can this be reimagined by AI?

• Data: AI can harness data at a much faster rate and directly from users. 
• Automation: Algorithms learn from data and experience. This allows us to train them for any security breaches as well as to explore new opportunities that may not be possible manually.
• Decision Making: AI increases the rate and quality of decision making as the number of inputs and the speed of processing for machines can be millions of times higher than for humans. 

Thus, AI can make lives safer and help employers gain insights on those areas that may have been opaque to them before. Our computer vision solution, IRIS AI is certainly changing lives and supporting business restart their operations.

Furthermore, predictive analytics and objective data are free from human gut feeling and experience. Many industries such as manufacturing, warehousing, retail, banking, automobile and many more have all moved sharply towards adapting computer vision technology. For example, in retail, AI can generate insights from online as well as physical stores (if connected using computer vision).

CONCLUSION:

In this AI-enabled world, it is almost imperative for companies to embrace AI to achieve a competitive edge. Companies need to identify what machines can do better than humans and vice versa, and then develop complementary roles and responsibilities for each, and redesign processes accordingly.