Using wearable devices to prevent injuries before they happen

Safety is a value, not a priority. Priorities can change over time, but value systems remain constant. As a part of building our culture of safety, DPR is piloting technology from Human Condition Safety (HCS), a workplace wearables startup that is creating a suite of tools that helps craft workers and their managers prevent injuries before they happen.

Used on select DPR project sites in Sacramento and the Bay Area, the HCS technology incorporates wearable devices that disappear into traditional safety clothing, artificial intelligence, BIM and cloud computing to create an ecosystem that keeps workers safe. An Autodesk development partner, HCS tightly integrates with existing BIM workflows, bringing the virtual and physical world together to reduce the frequency and severity of work-related injuries.

HCS software develops deep insights about safety and efficiency, and can identify safety issues in real-time, as well as predict future events. HCS focuses on activities and repetitive motion to pose the question, what can be prevented right now, and what can be prevented in the future?

“We are committed to injury-free environments, and leaving no stone unturned. We don’t want to fall into standard industry practices where people say, ‘we’ve always done it this way,’ but don’t know why,” said Rodney Spencley, who champions environmental health and safety at DPR. “HCS is one more tool for us to make sure every single DPR employee returns home safely to his or her family each night.”

In the event an incident does occur, HCS helps with DPR’s root cause analysis process, in which the team studies what happened and adjusts accordingly to avoid a similar incident in the future.

HCS conducted its first pilot project at New York’s Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Q2 of 2015, and its second pilot project at Citi Field ballpark. HCS will continue to conduct pilots in multiple locations and with various industries throughout 2016. These pilots are real-world trials to identify leading indicators of potential injuries, and to demonstrate how HCS’s technology creates measurable improvements in workplace safety incidents.