February 2022 Volume 4

EQUIPMENT & TECHNOLOGY

True Prevention Powered by Worker- Centric AI™ Using Worker-Centric AI™ to Shift from a Reactive to a Proactive Approach By Paul Thurber

Ask any safety professional what “prevention” means to them, and you will receive a multitude of answers. Merriam-Webster simply defines it as the “the act of preventing”; however, a more thorough definition is “the action of stopping something from happening or arising”. And just as the definition of prevention varies, how we use preventative measures to avoid incidents and accidents also differ among safety programs. But as new technology creates more opportunities for advancement in safety, we must ask ourselves, are we really doing everything we can to prevent incidents and injuries? Or are we merely doing what we have always done?

classified differently and considered “less serious”. But realistically, if a near miss must occur before we’re able to figure out how to prevent it, we’re already too late. This relies on what we call a reactive approach. Even though a near miss may not result in a serious injury or worse, did we actually “miss” anything? And should we consider this a victory in safety, even though we know an unsafe behavior occurred for this near miss to take place? The answer is simple: no.

Prevention Is Possible Prevention happens by stopping the behaviors and actions that lead to or enable incidents to occur in the first place. The goal of prevention is to simply avoid the unsafe behaviors altogether that lead to near misses and eventually incidents. But to achieve true preventative power, we must be able to observe 24/7/365. For humans, this isn’t possible. Between lunch breaks, bathroom breaks and the occasional distraction, we’re bound to miss something. But this is where we can use the power of technology, such as artificial intelligence (AI). In fact, there are proven systems and solutions that already exist. These systems are using advanced data analytics to prevent accidents and injuries before they happen. And they are utilizing Worker-Centric AI™ to do it.

The Truth About Near-Misses A common way to prevent future incidents involves recording near-miss data. Merriam-Webster tells us a near-miss is a “narrowly avoided collision or other accident.” In safety, near-miss data is collected, analyzed, and used to prevent these same incidents from occurring in the future. That’s prevention, right? Yes and no. While we can use near-miss data to prevent future events, a near miss must occur to figure out the root cause of the issue and how to correct it in order to avoid the same incident in the future. Because near misses are incidents that, perhaps, failed to result in an injury, they are

FIA MAGAZINE | FEBRUARY 2022 18