A Collaborative Tool for Safety Evaluation

Occupational Safety and Health (OHI), as well as prevention of occupational and industrial hazards, constitute strictly regulated and legally established domains in all developed countries. They are supported by well-defined guidelines for all organizations, businesses and workplaces of any scale. According to the report of the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work, the cost of labor accidents and occupational diseases in the European Union alone amounts to 476 billion Euros per year. While specifications and guidelines expand their depth and scope, responsible Technical Safety Advisers (TSAs) are called upon to control increasingly complex environments and process structures. These audits follow very specific practices and abide to international standards. Regardless of the time an experienced and competent TSA is willing to spent for such an audit, there are drawbacks that can inherently limit the quality of his or her final assessment.
The Safety4ALL project aims to engage the customer and trigger his or her involvement in a monitor, report and update loop for the validation and enrichment of safety measures. The human factor is the optimal sensor for capturing safety risks and the most capable intelligent agent, for processing contextual parameters and producing qualitative feedback. Each contribution will be rewarded with credits that can be used as discounts for future purchases or service uses. Safety4ALL will invest in mobile technologies and web services to power its functionality. Modern and intuitive capturing techniques will be explored to facilitate fast and easy input of safety observations from customers and visitors of the company (location awareness). The goal is to collect a large pool of observations and comments that either validated recorded safety risks or report new ones. This knowledge will be filtered, classified and analyzed using machine learning tools, supervised by TSAs. The extracted safety insights will be used to enrich and update the appropriate safety plans and prevention measures. Safety4ALL plans to place every customer in a more active and responsible role inside the context of procedures, measures and audits that monitor and prevent safety risks. When such measures and guidelines originate from the same people that they aim to protect, both efficiency and adoption rates are increased. Each customer or employee has the opportunity to point out deficiencies, report lacking measures and express valid concerns about events or parameters that foster or trigger critical safety risks. It is a platform that empowers the customers, employees and ultimately the community around and inside a business, to participate in ensuring the highest possible level of safety for the environment that surrounds them.