Safety Week Day 2 – Digital Innovations in Safety

To celebrate Safety Week's Tech Tuesday, today we focus on how digital technology, data and the Internet of Things (IoT) are being used to drive safety improvements across the world.

Our world is changing faster than ever. Everything around us is becoming smarter and more connected – cars, factories, ports, refineries, roads, office buildings, and even entire cities will be wired together in ways that will fundamentally change how people and systems interact. As we enter what many call the next Industrial Revolution, digitization is transforming safety – and at Jacobs we're helping our clients take advantage of cutting-edge technology to make their projects safer.

Road Safety

The autonomous vehicle is a transformative technology that will be the most significant disruption to current road design and construction over the next 20-30 years. At the forefront of this shift, Jacobs and Volterra Partners developed the ‘Pricing for Prosperity’ system, one of five finalists for the Wolfson Economics Prize 2017, the most significant global economics prize in the world after the Nobel Prize.  The team proposed a radical change in funding and user charging for roads, with a new approach offering a faster, more reliable and safer road network with guaranteed journey times, reduced congestion and less pollution. It eliminates motoring taxes and replaces them with variable charges for each journey, helping drivers make better decisions on how, when and where to travel. 

Wearable Technology and Virtual Reality

Wearable technology is already having a huge impact on site safety in the construction industry. Smart watches, helmets, safety vests and other such devices can be deployed to monitor location and movement around a site, measure worker fatigue, monitor health indicators (such as heart rate) and provide proximity warnings to hazardous areas. 

Virtual reality applications can also offer immersive and compelling site induction and training environments, allowing the user to experience working conditions from the safety of the office. Jacobs recently developed a virtual reality training solution, designed to keep workers safe on high speed roads, that helps improve site safety and minimize the time that they spend on site. 

The Internet of Things

Arguably one of the most important trends in recent years has been the rise of the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT). IoT refers to the physical objects that are connected to a network, allowing them to collect and transfer the data created by our ever-growing digital footprint.  Major construction projects generate large amounts of data, and construction firms are increasingly turning to the real-time analysis of this ‘big data’ to reduce waste, drive efficiency and make their projects and assets safer.  

A key challenge in this time of unprecedented change and increasing connectivity is to ensure that these new digital technologies work together seamlessly to support an organization’s strategic priorities. At the centre of this transformation is our Jacobs Connected Enterprise (JCE).  A suite of integrated capabilities and solutions to harness the power of digital technology and think beyond one-dimensional solutions. Integrating within the ecosystems of market-leading partners, our domain and technical expertise deliver end-to-end, innovative tailored solutions that provide safer, sustainable gains for our clients. 

For example, with the increased public reliance on mass transportation and social ride share services in cities around the world, we are piloting transit solutions employing aggregated analytics and sustainable management approaches to make multimodal transportation systems more agile and efficient to accommodate dynamic and growing demand flows. 

Learn more about our expertise in digitisation of climate change resilience and flood risk modelling solutions at www.jacobs.com/resiliency. 

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