By Gary Ng, CEO and co-founder of viAct
There is a major shift occurring at some of the most hazardous workplaces on the planet: oil refineries, large construction projects, and underground mines, as new and improving technologies are being used for the initial line of defence.
Technologies, like Artificial Intelligence (AI), robotics, and IoT wearables, especially smartwatches, have replaced the hard hat and safety supervisor as the last line of defence against workplace hazards by providing a first layer of protection against them.
Over the past few years, world has witnessed a rapid increase in both quantity and variety of robotic and automated systems being deployed to monitor, detect, and respond to workplace hazards in real-time, and there has probably never been a more opportune time for these technologies to evolve from being part of pilot programmes to permanent fixtures of the industrial workplace.
Autonomous robotics and smartwatches: The new safety stack
For years, manual inspection, periodic audits and stretched-thin human supervisors have provided the basis for establishing safety in high-risk industries. Pressurised pipelines managed by oil and gas facilities, construction sites with thousands of workers routinely exposed to extreme heat, and mining operations conducting blasting and excavating operations underground all share one vulnerability in common: the gap between when a hazard occurs and when a human identifies it.
Two converging technologies are reducing this gap. Autonomous robotics, including drones, and mobile inspection units are extending the area of safety monitoring significantly beyond what human supervisors could physically cover.
Simultaneously, AIoT-enabled smartwatches, are changing what happens in seconds after a hazard is detected. This is how it works: the AI CCTV identifies a safety violation, like PPE non-compliance or danger zone intrusion, identifies the worker involved, and sends real-time alert, via haptic vibration, directly to the concerned worker.
The worker corrects the behaviour and shares proof of their corrective action, thus creating an auditable trail with date, time and locations of the whole process. What typically took 24 to 48 hours under the previous manual system now occurs in less than five minutes.
This closed-loop model with AI CCTV used as the brain and the smartwatch as the last mile, is now being deployed across various oil and gas facilities, large construction jobsites, and mining sites worldwide, where the amount of industrial work and the intensity of operating conditions have made the case for “always-on AI safety” impossible to ignore.
Where are robotics and AI making the biggest difference?
In all the high-risk industries, the baseline capabilities such as PPE detection, danger zone intrusion and confined space monitoring are considered as the minimum layers of AI safety that operators are expected to have in place. Beyond these, each industry is driving AI adoption around their specific challenges.
For example, in the oil and gas sector, one of the critical applications centres around lone worker monitoring in remote and offshore environments, where a smartwatch detecting and alerting worker malaise can mean the difference between a rescue and a fatality.
Similarly, in a construction site, AI CCTV monitoring combined with biometric data from smartwatches for heat stress management enables early intervention before situations become critical.
Likewise, in mining, blast zone clearance monitoring is one of the priorities where haptic alerts from the smartwatch cut through noise and darkness, ensuring every worker is accounted for before detonation.
Real-world deployments are already translating these capabilities into measurable safety outcomes on the ground. One such deployment, currently underway in the Middle East, offers a particularly compelling example of what this integrated model can deliver.
A real-world success story: viAct begins Middle East trials of AI CCTV integrated with smartwatches for real-time industrial safety
viAct, an HSE-focused AI company operating across the GCC, has begun implementing its integrated closed-loop technology model with several of its current clients throughout the region, like Aramco, Neom, Sajco, Adnoc Gas, Saudi Telecom Company, ACWA Power, SABIC, and Oxagon Industrial Complex – all utilizing this integrated approach in the oil & gas, construction, and manufacturing in Saudi Arabia and the UAE particularly.
The outcomes from the existing deployments provide evidence to support this next phase of expansion. On a construction site in Saudi Arabia, for managing large numbers of workers under extreme desert conditions, viAct combined its AI video analytics solutions with its IoT smart watches. This connected worker-safety technology provided real-time heat stress alerts, resulting in a 63 percent reduction in on-site medical incidents.
In addition, 95 percent compliance rates were achieved with automatic logging of hydration breaks and PPE compliance. These results directly reflect the kind of measurable, ground-level impact this integrated closed-loop technology model is capable of delivering at scale.
What comes next for AI-driven industrial safety?
With increasing global regulatory pressure and increased demand from project owners for easily verifiable safety compliance data, the use of AI and robotics in many high-risk industries will rapidly accelerate for the duration of this decade.
Governments throughout the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and beyond are increasing their occupational safety mandates, which means that the burden of proof has shifted from post-incident reporting to continuous and documented compliance that is being done in real-time.
The companies that are getting ahead of the game right now, by incorporating computer vision and AIoT-enabled smartwatches, into their safety programs, will likely set the standard that other companies must eventually meet. The closed-loop safety model has transitioned from a competitive advantage for first-movers to an expected minimum requirement across the global oil and gas, construction, and mining industries.
About the author: Gary Ng, CEO and co-founder of viAct, comes with a background of building engineering who turned into AIpreneur with inception of viAct in 2016. He has 10+ years of experience in implementing technological innovations in construction industry. Before viAct, he was the managing director of 3D fashiontech EFI Optitex. Also rewarded as the best regional senior executive in Nasdaq listed technology enterprise Stratasys. With his ultimate strength of analytical thinking and strategic decision making, Gary was also the advisory board member for SXSV in his early career. Gary believes in the concept of transferring knowledge from experienced to youngsters and is a renowned academic professional. Currently he is a visiting faculty professional at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Gray is also an active public speaker & preacher of AI driven sustainability in workplaces.