In 2024, workplace injuries led to a total of $181.4 billion in losses.
In the US alone.
That’s (around) twice Apple’s net income from the same year ($93.73 billion). And 12 times that of Walmart’s ($15.51 billion).
Many of these injuries result from overlooked safety practices. From a small hazard ignored until it turned into a catastrophe. Or from skipping steps in safety practices.
To prevent these, OSHA (Occupational Health and Safety Administration) recommends you regularly monitor activity on the plant floor to identify and flag hazards and compliance violations.
AI can help with real-time safety monitoring. Consider a safety observation solution that relies on AI smart glasses, like the Meta Ray Ban.
On your safety walk, you wear the smart glasses and walk around the plant floor as usual. As you do so, the AI inside the glasses monitors real-time safety behaviours from the floor and records the footage. Then, once your walk is over, the AI gives you a detailed safety report, identifying compliance violations and hazards it just recorded.
There are many benefits to such AI real-time safety monitoring solutions. Let’s have a look at them:
1. Obtain evidence of actual on-the-floor safety
Human working memory can only hold information for 1-15 seconds. Paper records are vulnerable to clutter, tampering, and total loss. Still, most safety officers rely on both of these unreliable methods to prepare safety reports after their inspections.
AI real-time safety monitoring solutions are anything but unreliable. Instead, you receive evidence of on-the-floor compliance practices, violations, and hazards in video, photo, and text formats.
If your workers are diligent in compliance practices, you have evidence to prove it. If your workers are straying from compliance practices or outright ignoring them, you have evidence for that, too. All of which you can then store in your internal safety portal.
The evidence also gives you the ammo to make an impact.
For example, if AI flags a specific department for repeatedly skipping important safety procedures, you can talk to them. Maybe they’re novices who don’t understand the importance of the steps they’ve just skipped. Or they have unreasonable workloads, which leads them to skip safety practices to complete work faster.
You can take action in both cases. In the case of novices, you can give constructive feedback and educate them on the consequences of skipping safety procedures. In the case of the higher workload, you can resolve the problem with higher authorities.
On the other hand, if you use your memory or paper for evidence, you’ll have a tougher time. You’ll either get outright ignored, or your concerns will get dismissed—both by citing a lack of evidence.
3. Make workers more mindful of safety behaviours
Non-compliant safety behaviours don’t always begin intentionally. Oftentimes, a worker takes a shortcut to save time—like not wearing PPE—and nothing bad happens. Nothing bad happens, the next few times the worker repeats the behaviour too. The worker mistakes the behaviour as safe, and the shortcut eventually becomes routine.
But such shortcuts that feel safe are areas where hazards lurk the most.
By implementing an AI plant floor safety monitoring solution, you can cut the problem at the root. Because knowing that violations can get flagged with evidence, workers are less likely to experiment with time-saving shortcuts in the first place.
Instead, the awareness of being monitored makes them more aware of their own actions. In effect, they perform each step in the safety procedures mindfully and are thus less likely to make mistakes out of carelessness as well.
4. Spend less time writing reports
Writing a safety observation report is time-consuming. It requires you to sit down at your desk, recall evidence from your memory or your paper notes, and mention each violation and rationale.
You’ll have to find time for writing the report while you’re managing a host of other responsibilities, from training new workers to preparing for audits.
AI real-time safety monitoring solutions create the reports for you. After each inspection, the AI prepares a detailed report, pairing violations with relevant evidence. Before approving, you can go through the report, using your expert judgment to confirm and dismiss violations.
Once you approve, the report gets automatically uploaded to your company portal. Anyone who demands the report has it at their fingertips, complete with verifiable evidence and precise explanations.
