It was a Monday, the first day of July and a short week for most, as most were looking forward to a three-day work week heading into Independence Day. It was a typically humid, warm summer morning here near the southwestern end of Kentucky and still dark—sunrise was 40 minutes away. Brian K. Chappell, who had been on the job for about 90 minutes already, wouldn’t be alive to see it. The 44-year-old was hauling demolished car scrap back from Tennessee to his employer’s recycling yard in Livermore via Interstate 69. At some point, he drifted off as did his 2012 ProStar Class 8 truck. The tractor-trailer, which all together weighed 79,000 lb. veered onto the unprotected grassy median and into the southbound lane. The rusty blue trailer tipped and skidded 33 ft. before violently smashing into the guardrail. The crumpled cab was now as unrecognizable as the freight. The emergency response crew arrived around 10 minutes later and pronounced Chappell dead at the scene. A 62-year-old man in a pickup who had not been able to avoid the overturned trailer blocking both southbound lanes was rushed to the hospital. He was seriously injured but would survive. It was the fourth crash involving semis in Kentucky in less than a week, killing at least four others and injuring more than 26. Accidents happen, especially around the Fourth of July. After analyzing the report on this July 1 crash, provided by the Kentucky Fatality Assessment and Control Evaluation (FACE) program, an extension of the University of Kentucky’s College of Public Health, this one was absolutely avoidable.And maybe by examining this tragic instance, it could help prevent another. Determining fault First, let’s determine the root cause. Losses of life in these situations seem pretty easy to explain: The driver fell asleep and died as a result; Darwinism at work, now move along, nothing to see here. Yes, it does appear true that Chappell fell asleep. The original investigating officer surmised this, and the FACE investigator Beau Mosley concurred, “as there was no evidence of an attempted correction, no gouge marks, attempted braking, etc. This typically only occurs when either the driver is asleep behind the wheel or unconscious due to a medical event, [and] the medical event was ruled out.” But was this a case where Chappell was solely at fault? Would he be alive if only he had been better prepared for the drive with more sleep and more coffee? That also may be true, but nobody alive knows everything Chappell personally did between picking up the junked car freight somewhere in Tennessee and heading back to home base in Livermore, Ky. Here’s what the report wrote about him: The victim was a 44-year old male who had been employed with the company for 12 months. He was never married and had less than a high school education. Prior to working for the company, the victim had driven commercially for other companies for five years. What we also know is that these are not rare occurrence. Mosley has reconstructed three fatalities (not all for FACE) where fatigue was a major factor. “Fatigue-related fatality collisions are common,” Mosley said. “As stated in the report, (NHTSA) studies show that falling asleep behind the wheel resulted in 846 fatalities in 2014. That’s 2.6% of all fatalities during that year.” Fatigued driving itself is an all-too common phenomenon. Based on self-reporting, the CDC found 1 in 25 adults fell asleep behind the wheel in the last 30 days. Each person likely nodded off for different reasons, each affected by different variables. The major takeaway is that we all have done the head bob at some point in our lives and are lucky enough to still be here. We’re humans; we get tired. A major problem is that truckers are humans (who get tired) responsible for a considerably higher amount of mass on the road.  On average, the cars on the road weigh a scant 3.5% less than the truck in question, which right before impact was a nearly 40-ton uncontrolled battering ram barreling down the highway. The speed wasn’t determined, but this stretch near I-69 mile marker 36 was a 70-mph zone. According to the FMCSA’s Large Truck Crash Causation Study, 13% of commercial vehicle drivers who crashed were fatigued. This study, from 2007 and relying on 2001-2003 data from 120,000 crashes involving 141,000 large trucks, found brake problems were most common cause (29% of cases), while illegal drugs (2%) and alcohol (1%) were least common. While the NHTSA study Mosley cited found 846 deaths due to drivers falling asleep, other studies have attributed between 5,000 and 8,000 deaths annually due to drowsy driving. The FMCSA recommends commercial drivers stay off the roads when the body is naturally predisposition to sleep, which is between 12 a.m. to 6 a.m. and 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.The other issue is the repetitive nature of truck driving. If you’re driving out west during the day, with scenic vistas brightening up the journey, of course you’ll be a bit more alert and focused because your work at that point is more enjoyable. And if traffic is denser and/or the weather is bad, you’re also going to clench a little tighter on the wheel. What Chappell faced — a dark, uncluttered road on a muggy morning — was the driving equivalent of a warm glass of milk and white noise. The fact is Chappell paid for his mistake with his life. But the root causes, the repetitive nature of driving and natural nighttime fatigue, live on. What to do? To combat drowsy driving, a fleet manager can simply not let drivers out after midnight. “Companies should be aware of, and avoid, scheduling commercial drivers to work during these high-risk time periods when fatigue is most likely,” FACE recommends in the report. It’s noble to try, but that midnight cutoff didn’t work in Gremlins, and it isn’t really feasible for many long hauls. That’s where technology comes in. Newer trucks have all sorts of cameras and alerts to ensure truckers can see into their blind spots maintain their lanes. The 2012 ProStar Chappell drove did not have these, but International’s newer LT Series can employ the Bendix Wingman Fusion lane departure warning that may have roused Chappell in time to avoid losing control. Companies and the government have known the about drowsy commercial driving and all the collateral damage and death that comes with it for quite some time. Trucking hottest hot button topic, the mandatory use of electronic logging devices (ELDs), stems from monitoring drivers Hours of Service and thus, giving management the data to prevent fatigued drivers from endangering the safety of themselves and others. The mandate went into effect Dec. 16, 2016, but Chappell’s company had an exemption for short-haul drivers who operate within a 100-air-mile radius of their reporting location. The crash happened near the Graves-Marshall County line, which is slightly more than 100 road miles away, though on this trip he was reportedly coming from Tennessee. In the report, FACE advised all companies to install ELDs, which “can alert company supervisory personnel of driving behaviors that may be related to driving while fatigued such as hard application of the brakes and quick turns that affect the stability of the vehicle. These alerts would allow company personnel to contact the driver to investigate further and possibly prevent a collision from occurring.” The Paducah Sun reported that McCracken County authorities (where the crash took place) confirmed Chappell overturned a semi the previous week. No injuries or other involved vehicles were reported. It should also be noted authorities initially misreported Chappell was traveling southbound on July 1. Fleet Owner reached out to the company for clarification, which assisted with the FACE investigation, but so far, has declined to comment. The company has four drivers, four commercial vehicles and six semi-trailers. FACE does recommend employers test drivers for sleep apnea, which could be a reason a driver is consistently fatigued. The University of Pennsylvania found more than 1 in four commercial drivers suffer from a mild to severe form of the disorder, which interrupts healthy sleep patterns. You can find a sleep lab to get tested by visiting this site. Health and privacy are sticky legal issues fleet owners may not want to deal with, though those certainly seems more ideal than living with a horrific crash on your conscience. An Australian company, Seeing Machines, uses a camera mounted in the dash and face- and gaze-tracking algorithms to determine if a driver is getting drowsy or distracted. If the situation warrants it, the system activates alarms and seat vibrations. Data is also sent to the fleet management to intervene if needed. In the last 12 months, the company has detected more than 5 million detracted events and intervened in almost 120,000 fatigue events. It was a Monday, the first day of July and a short week for most, as most were looking forward to a three-day work week heading into Independence Day. It was a typically humid, warm summer morning here near the southwestern end of Kentucky and still dark—sunrise was 40 minutes away. Brian K. Chappell, who had been on the job for about 90 minutes already, wouldn’t be alive to see it. The 44-year-old was hauling demolished car scrap back from Tennessee to his employer’s recycling yard in Livermore via Interstate 69. At some point, he drifted off as did his 2012 ProStar Class 8 truck. The tractor-trailer, which all together weighed 79,000 lb. veered onto the unprotected grassy median and into the southbound lane. The rusty blue trailer tipped and skidded 33 feet before violently smashing into the guardrail. Kentucky Injury Prevention and Research CenterKentucky Injury Prevention and Research CenterThis diagram shows the path a Class 8 truck took when the driver fell asleep going north on Interstate 69 in Kentucky on the early morning of July 1, 2019. The driver, 44, was pronounced dead at the scene. A man whose pickup collided with the overturned wreck survived. This diagram shows the path a Class 8 truck took when the driver fell asleep going north on Interstate 69 in Kentucky on the early morning of July 1, 2019. The driver, 44, was pronounced dead at the scene. A man whose pickup collided with the overturned wreck survived. The crumpled cab was now as unrecognizable as the freight. The emergency response crew arrived around 10 minutes later and pronounced Chappell dead at the scene. A 62-year-old man in a pickup who had not been able to avoid the overturned trailer blocking both southbound lanes was rushed to the hospital. He was seriously injured but would survive. It was the fourth crash involving semis in Kentucky in less than a week, killing at least four others and injuring more than 26. Accidents happen, especially around the Fourth of July. After analyzing the report on this July 1 crash, provided by the Kentucky Fatality Assessment and Control Evaluation (FACE) program, an extension of the University of Kentucky’s College of Public Health, this one was absolutely avoidable.And maybe by examining this tragic instance, it could help prevent another. Determining fault First, let’s determine the root cause. Losses of life in these situations seem pretty easy to explain: The driver fell asleep and died as a result; Darwinism at work, now move along, nothing to see here. Yes, it does appear true that Chappell fell asleep. The original investigating officer surmised this, and the FACE investigator Beau Mosley concurred, “as there was no evidence of an attempted correction, no gouge marks, attempted braking, etc. This typically only occurs when either the driver is asleep behind the wheel or unconscious due to a medical event, [and] the medical event was ruled out.” But was this a case where Chappell was solely at fault? Would he be alive if only he had been better prepared for the drive with more sleep and more coffee? That also may be true, but nobody alive knows everything Chappell personally did between picking up the junked car freight somewhere in Tennessee and heading back to home base in Livermore, Ky. Here’s what the report wrote about him: The victim was a 44-year old male who had been employed with the company for 12 months. He was never married and had less than a high school education. Prior to working for the company, the victim had driven commercially for other companies for five years. What we also know is that these are not rare occurrence. Mosley has reconstructed three fatalities (not all for FACE) where fatigue was a major factor. “Fatigue-related fatality collisions are common,” Mosley said. “As stated in the report, (NHTSA) studies show that falling asleep behind the wheel resulted in 846 fatalities in 2014. That’s 2.6% of all fatalities during that year.” Fatigued driving itself is an all-too common phenomenon. Based on self-reporting, the CDC found 1 in 25 adults fell asleep behind the wheel in the last 30 days. Each person likely nodded off for different reasons, each affected by different variables. The major takeaway is that we all have done the head bob at some point in our lives and are lucky enough to still be here. We’re humans; we get tired. A major problem is that truckers are humans (who get tired) responsible for a considerably higher amount of mass on the road.  On average, the cars on the road weigh a scant 3.5% less than the truck in question, which right before impact was a nearly 40-ton uncontrolled battering ram barreling down the highway. The speed wasn’t determined, but this stretch near I-69 mile marker 36 was a 70-mph zone. According to the FMCSA’s Large Truck Crash Causation Study, 13% of commercial vehicle drivers who crashed were fatigued. This study, from 2007 and relying on 2001-2003 data from 120,000 crashes involving 141,000 large trucks, found brake problems were most common cause (29% of cases), while illegal drugs (2%) and alcohol (1%) were least common. While the NHTSA study Mosley cited found 846 deaths due to drivers falling asleep, other studies have attributed between 5,000 and 8,000 deaths annually due to drowsy driving. The FMCSA recommends commercial drivers stay off the roads when the body is naturally predisposition to sleep, which is between 12 a.m. to 6 a.m. and 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.The other issue is the repetitive nature of truck driving. If you’re driving out west during the day, with scenic vistas brightening up the journey, of course you’ll be a bit more alert and focused because your work at that point is more enjoyable. And if traffic is denser and/or the weather is bad, you’re also going to clench a little tighter on the wheel. What Chappell faced — a dark, uncluttered road on a muggy morning — was the driving equivalent of a warm glass of milk and white noise. The fact is Chappell paid for his mistake with his life. But the root causes, the repetitive nature of driving and natural nighttime fatigue, live on. What to do? To combat drowsy driving, a fleet manager can simply not let drivers out after midnight. “Companies should be aware of, and avoid, scheduling commercial drivers to work during these high-risk time periods when fatigue is most likely,” FACE recommends in the report. It’s noble to try, but that midnight cutoff didn’t work in Gremlins, and it isn’t really feasible for many long hauls. That’s where technology comes in. Newer trucks have all sorts of cameras and alerts to ensure truckers can see into their blind spots maintain their lanes. The 2012 ProStar Chappell drove did not have these, but International’s newer LT Series can employ the Bendix Wingman Fusion lane departure warning that may have roused Chappell in time to avoid losing control. Companies and the government have known the about drowsy commercial driving and all the collateral damage and death that comes with it for quite some time. Trucking hottest hot button topic, the mandatory use of electronic logging devices (ELDs), stems from monitoring drivers Hours of Service and thus, giving management the data to prevent fatigued drivers from endangering the safety of themselves and others. The mandate went into effect Dec. 16, 2016, but Chappell’s company had an exemption for short-haul drivers who operate within a 100-air-mile radius of their reporting location. The crash happened near the Graves-Marshall County line, which is slightly more than 100 road miles away, though on this trip he was reportedly coming from Tennessee. In the report, FACE advised all companies to install ELDs, which “can alert company supervisory personnel of driving behaviors that may be related to driving while fatigued such as hard application of the brakes and quick turns that affect the stability of the vehicle. These alerts would allow company personnel to contact the driver to investigate further and possibly prevent a collision from occurring.” The Paducah Sun reported that McCracken County authorities (where the crash took place) confirmed Chappell overturned a semi the previous week. No injuries or other involved vehicles were reported. It should also be noted authorities initially misreported Chappell was traveling southbound on July 1. Fleet Owner reached out to the company for clarification, which assisted with the FACE investigation, but so far, has declined to comment. The company has four drivers, four commercial vehicles and six semi-trailers. FACE does recommend employers test drivers for sleep apnea, which could be a reason a driver is consistently fatigued. The University of Pennsylvania found more than 1 in four commercial drivers suffer from a mild to severe form of the disorder, which interrupts healthy sleep patterns. You can find a sleep lab to get tested by visiting this site. Health and privacy are sticky legal issues fleet owners may not want to deal with, though those certainly seems more ideal than living with a horrific crash on your conscience. An Australian company, Seeing Machines, uses a camera mounted in the dash and face- and gaze-tracking algorithms to determine if a driver is getting drowsy or distracted. If the situation warrants it, the system activates alarms and seat vibrations. Data is also sent to the fleet management to intervene if needed. In the last 12 months, the company has detected more than 5 million detracted events and intervened in almost 120,000 fatigue events. Seeing MachinesSeeing MachinesSeeing Machines' Guardian solution relies on cameras, detection algorithms, and alerts to prevent drivers from falling asleep while driving. Seeing Machines' Guardian solution relies on cameras, detection algorithms, and alerts to prevent drivers from falling asleep while driving. The next obvious solution would be to remove the driver completely and use more self-driving trucks, as artificial intelligence doesn’t have the biological imperative for sleep. But Mosley doubts one crash on a lonely Kentucky highway will do much to sway the public. But it could certainly get more conversations started. “I think it’s too early for the public to grasp the technology as it seems so farfetched currently,” Mosley said. “Like anything new, people need time to acclimate, but a case like this would build a strong argument to establish the reasoning behind the technology.” In the end, fleets don’t need to wait around for a decade or more for these accidents to stop. The technology and best practices already exist to prevent tragedies like these. The only question is if fleets care enough about their drivers and others on the road to do something about it. Let's block ads! (Why?)

One hundred years ago, Douglas Starch Works erupted like a powder keg, shaking the city of Cedar Rapids so violently some thought the Germans were bombing America’s heartland. Forty-three workers from the evening shift died that May evening, though new plant worker John Griffin was miraculously spared, as he decided to walk back to his nearby home for supper. For him, it was a near miss, though he would have to live with the memory of pulling his coworkers’ bodies from the smoldering rubble.Roughly 50 employees suffer fatal injuries at work annually in Iowa, or almost one per week. In 2017, the Bureau of Labor Statistics tallied the total U.S. number at 5,147. Globally, 2.3 million die a year due to work-related injury or illness, or 6,000 a day, according to the International Labour Organization. But no one can really tell how many near misses there are, how many times someone courts tragedy and instead of slipping in a puddle and falling down the steel stairwell, merely loses their balance. Few are inclined to report an “almost” bad thing unless they just avoided a horrific event like a plane crash or factory explosion. That’s an excellent conversation starter. Conversely, pedestrian near-misses carry a stigma—and negative consequences, notes Charles Douros, senior consultant for ProAct Safety.In a piece he wrote for our sister brand EHS Today about near-misses (which OSHA defines as “an unplanned event that did not result in injury, illness, or damage—but had the potential to do so”), Douros writes “if it occurred because someone ignored or neglected a safety procedure, there might be a reluctance to report it for fear of reprisal. It’s essentially a lagging indicator—something bad has already happened and now the company is forced to react to it.”It’s bad business to be reactive. You should always strive to be the one who knocks, lest you be the one who gets knocked over. Manufacturing and other industrial sectors already practice this with their mechanical assets, having spent the better part of the decade developing tools and software to help them preempt disasters and downtime using data. We’ve covered this so frequently within these pages that it seems predictive maintenance startups are as common as Starbucks or mattress stores. But how often is that courtesy extended to the fleshy, less robust productivity drivers in the plant or facility, the ones who have pain tolerances and families and lawyers?Today, there are not many data-forward solutions to help plant managers avoid near-misses, let alone injury. But Gabriel Glynn, the great-grandson of John Griffin, is set to change all that. The Des Moines-based company he co-founded, MākuSafe (pronounced “Make-You-Safe”), provides workers with a sensor-stuffed wearable device worn above the elbow that collects all sorts of vital environmental data, from noise to light to temperature. The data are then transmitted to the charging kiosk/edge device, which then sends the info to the cloud. This is where the MākuSmart software correlates location and environmental data, combing through real-time sensor data to find anomalies and potential dangers. Over time, with enough training of the software to recognize a company’s cadence, the system promises to identify dangers and OSHA violations before they happen.The device is in five facilities now and will be available Q1 of 2020, at a cost of about $22/month per device. The battery life is about 24 hours, so two workers can use it in the same day. The national worker’s comp bill per month is almost $5 billion, so it's a good deal.    We’re in the throes of the IIoT revolution, so plants and other facilities probably have sensors abounding, though they can be mounted on walls hundreds of feet away from the action. “In a matter of a few feet, the environment can be totally different,” Glynn says. “Depending on what side of the machine you stand on, the sound exposure can be dramatically different.”Using humans as a sensor allows a more exact mapping of the environment, allowing managers to go from a rough Google Maps snapshot to a detailed Google Street View look at their operation. And this then promotes action. If a new machine generates more noise than anticipated, up the hearing protection. Maybe the TVOC sensor alerts to higher levels spilling out of the paint room, which means it might be time to investigate the ventilation. If an area’s temperature spikes, it might be time to relieve the crew for a water break. And if you leave the device in your car in the summer heat, it will make your team think you’re on the face of the sun, as Glynn recently found out. “We’ve come a long way from 100 years ago when factories were exploding due to starch dust, but there’s more we can do,” says Glynn, a serial software entrepreneur who previously started and sold a mobile ERP company. “It feels predestined that a hundred years later I would get to work on a product that was designed to prevent these kinds of things.” It’s as much industrial pedigree as fate for Glynn, whose father—a former machinist and longtime safety manager—taught him the value of a safe, healthy worker to the overall company. Glynn got the idea for the wearable about five years ago after talking with his dad about the OSHA auditing process for lost hearing. Being around industrial safety for a better part of his life also informed Glynn on industrial rules such as no wrist or neck-worn accessories, which could snag on equipment. The armband is designed to tear away from the wearer if caught on something. Armed with this familial knowledge, combined with this recent work running the Advanced Manufacturing Podcast where he visited several factories and workers, Glynn knew environmental safety was ripe for disruption. And this solution would be a win-win for workers and plants.   “My Safety Sense is Tingling”“Fatigue is the leading cause of accidents and the environment is the leading contributor for fatigue,” Glynn says.Logically, if you want to address accidents, which occur 500 times a minute around the world, you attack the environment. Glynn and fellow co-founder and CTO Mark Frederick, who does the heavy lifting on the hardware side, made sure the MākuSafe wearable absorbs just about every imaginable piece of environmental data to keep workers safe and productive. It has an accelerometer to detect slips and falls, a noise dosimeter to pick up auditory danger, visible and infrared light sensor to ensure work zones are properly illuminated, and temperature and humidity sensors to verify work zones are safe and dry. The pager-sized device also tracks CO2 and total volatile organic compounds (TVOC) levels, the latter of which could cause immediate or long-term respiratory issues. If that weren’t enough, Glynn says the patents leave room for several other sensors in the future.And MākuSafe doesn’t miss near-misses.“If a guy trips on crack on the floor, our device picks that up and records it on their behalf,” Glynn says. The machine learning within the cloud-based backend, MākuSmart software, has been trained to look for when the accelerometer hits above 2 g and the arms move back and outward, or other wild gesticulating indicative of a losing one’s balance. That sends an alert, along with time, location and user, to the safety manager’s mobile device app, who can address the incident with the employee. An early pilot validated this real-time system. Glynn recalls the device recorded the slip and the safety manager verified that is what happened and investigated why. A mat between two machines was too short, leaving a gap that clearly created a tripping hazard. A new mat was quickly put in place to eliminate the danger.Ordinarily, a wet spot on the floor or crack in the concrete would be overlooked unless it resulted in a serious injury. That takes time and time is money.“Employees don’t want to stop their work and spend 15 minutes filling out paperwork for an accident that didn’t even happen, says Glynn, who independently verified OSHA’s findings that 80-90% of near-misses go unreported. “They have quotas to meet.”Not every near-miss can be recorded by the suite of sensors, but a human’s senses would, such as if a pallet full of material were to fall from a high shelf near a person. This could easily result in loss of life, but the loss of productivity can be more pressing if your safety culture takes a backseat to the bottom line.MākuSafe prepared for this eventuality with a voice recorder that can log the incident with the push of a button. All the necessary data, from who reported it to all the environmental context, gets sent with the voice memo, which is translated to text and put in the incident report. This costs 15 seconds of worker time and is invaluable in finding and catching potential hazards to the works. The relays have a range of about 100 m, and if the worker is beyond that, or working in an enclosed space such as a freezer, the data is stored on the device and sent when within range.This not only keeps workers from missing time, and the company losing productivity, but helps foster a healthier safety culture. It’s a technological take on a good catch program, a more positive look at near-misses as opportunities to continuously improve.“Employees can feel very good about taking some measure of action to potentially prevent a bad thing from happening,” concludes Douros. “It’s an opportunity for employees to see the potential for an injury before one happens and do something to address it. There is usually no stigma attached to this program since it isn’t blame-based.” Forecasting Disaster to Prevent ItThe value of a wearable safety device, whether it’s the MākuSafe that detects ambient data, or the ear-worn Bodytrak device, which focuses more on physiological data analytics (and also includes fall detection), is that they convert traditional lagging indicators, which tell you how something got screwed up, into leading indicators, which help avoid the screwup entirely.Glynn, a native of Iowa, likens it to the evolution of how the National Weather Service has evolved to warn people about tornados.“When I was a kid, the siren would go off and you’d look out the window and there’d be a tornado right there and you have 10 seconds to get down the basement,” he recalls. Because of new satellite and radar technology, things are vastly different now. Glynn notes that this summer he received a tornado warning days ahead of the expected touchdown.Glynn says it’s just as crucial for plant management to predict which way the wind will blow within their factories.“Knowing the environmental conditions and how they change, when they change, and what the impact is on the worker gets us to a place where we can forecast risk and identify things well before they present a risk to the worker,” he says.He projects that as the technology evolves, the alerts sent from the device to the MākuSmart system will initiate automated responses, such as starting the air system up when humidity reaches a certain level that could create condensation and a slippery floor.Preventing falls is the obvious use, and a reason EMC Insurance Companies, also based in Des Moines, is running a pilot with MākuSafe, which identifies itself as insurtech (insurance technology).“The world’s changing for our agents and policyholders,” says Bryon Snethen, EMC VP of risk improvement. “We want to provide them value beyond insurance; wearable technology and effective data analysis are some of the ways we’re pursuing that.”While that testing is still ongoing, the basic calculus works from a cost-benefit standpoint. Worker’s compensation claims cost $1.2 billion per week in America, a huge reason why the industrial safety market is worth $3.3 billion and will grow 64% by 2024, according to MarketsandMarkets Research.An average wrist injury, likely due to a fall, can cost $50,000. It makes more sense for an insurer to outfit the factory with MākuSafe’s devices and software as a service for about $20,000 a year for a factory of 150 (if employees share the devices). If the solution prevented one such injury over two years, the insurer saves $10,000. [embedded content] Productivity as a ByproductAs with any new stream of data, the benefits aren’t always clear cut or obvious. That accelerometer has uncovered more than just tripping hazards. Glynn says that a test at an industrial laundry facility alerted management to odd jerky motions every hour or so at the bottom of a chute. They investigated and found the design of the fixtures was causing a laundry clog, which workers would have to tug at to free. They expended more energy than necessary on vigorous repetitive movements, which could lead to arm injuries over time. And in the short term, it created a material bottleneck. The problem was fixed, and productivity increased.“The more we understand the environment and what the optimal conditions are, the more efficient and productive workers can be,” Glynn says.Worker’s comp savings can be hard to predict for a specific factory, and therefore a hard sell when so many other areas of the plant need digital upgrades to increase revenue. But in theory, wearable safety tech should improve a host of productivity KPIs as well. An increase in machine uptime could be one of the more noticeable happy byproducts.“Eighty percent of equipment failure comes down to human operator error,” says Jim Stuart, senior vice president of digital products at Lloyd's Register.Lloyd’s recently came out with the AllAssets Asset Performance Management (APM) platform to manage these risks from the machine side, using machine data, digital twins and the cloud-based, SAP S4HANA SaaS to reduce planned maintenance in oil & gas and shipping by more than 20% and avoid catastrophic machine failures which at worst cause injury or death, but more likely will create machine downtime and a loss of productivity.Machines are only half the battle, though. His company is now investigating a solution similar to MākuSafe to complete the three-pronged strategy to address worker fatigue and reduce accidents. The first two are training and preparedness, controllable enough variables due to processes in place.“The most challenging part is humans’ interactions with environmental challenges,” he says.He says more actionable data, from both machines and people, will be critical to addressing that challenge.“Being able to stream real-time data means that you can get to insights much quicker and you can intervene much quicker as well,” Stuart says. “So, I think all of that stuff's going to have a positive impact in terms of reducing safety risks and improving performance.” Culture ShockAvoiding death and dismemberment are the obvious reasons to institute a more data-driven safety strategy, but not everything is life-and-death. The positive impacts on employees are often more subtle but can be more far-reaching. Even if the safety manager investigates an alert from the MākuSafe app and realizes it’s perhaps human error or false alarm, these interactions improve the plant culture by creating conversations outside of the mandatory training sessions which Glynn relegates to: “It’s March, let’s take out our binders, we’re going to talk about heavy lifting for two hours.”This allows safety managers (like Glynn’s dad) to “identify real problems specific to them and build that culture that is vital to the attraction and retention of employees,” he says.And open communication is one path to destigmatizing accident reporting that just might work, though it’s weird to think this is a novel idea when nearly everyone shares way too many facets of their lives on social media, from their gourmet mac n’ cheese to their crudely drawn tattoos. While the digitally native Gen Z, which is poised to own a plurality of the workforce at 40% next year, love texting and Snapchatting and WhatsApping, they want feedback in person. A Kronos survey found three out of four prefer face-to-face manager feedback. If the manager can use technology-driven data to back up a safety counseling session, all the better. RainStar/ iStock/ Getty Images PlusThere’s nothing better to dispel the “dark, dirty dangerous” stigma manufacturing can’t quite shed than to show visiting high school classes on Manufacturing Day than to show each worker is as much a high-value asset as the multi-million-dollar machines and has the sensors to prove it.“The more employers can do to make jobs safer and more pleasant, and allow workers to not get fatigued as often, the can retain and attract a better workforce,” Glynn says.It’s also a great way to show current employees their worth and keep them from seeking a new environment.“Employees will go down the street for a variety of reasons, and because of that competition, the value of the human worker has never been higher in my entire lifetime,” Glynn says. Let's block ads! (Why?)

It’s pretty apparent the world has a plastic problem, from the 2.6 million tons of plastic debris flowing from rivers into the world’s oceans to the various forms of the transparent refuse that end up in landfills. According to the EPA, Americans created about 14.7 million tons of plastic containers and packaging waste in 2015 alone, which accounted for 5.5% of all municipal solid waste (MSW). The percentage recycled increased from 9% in 2000 to 14.6% in 2015, but more than two-thirds still ended up in landfills. For the last six years, leading toymaker Hasbro has attempted to mitigate the environmental impact its plastic packaging has had. In 2013 the Providence-based company known for manufacturing Mr. Potato Head and Transformers switched from polyvinyl chloride (PVC), which release potentially dangerous dioxins, to the more easily recyclable polyethylene terephthalate (PET). Three years later the move was made to post-consumer recycled (rPET) and just last year, Hasbro started using bioPET, which is made with plant-based materials. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images News Justin Sullivan/Getty Images News Now, after all that iteration, and likely supply chain shifting, equipment changeouts, and countless hours of engineering and training, they’re scrapping the whole plan for an even bolder move. “We’re actually going to be phasing out plastics altogether in our packaging, beginning next year,” says Kathrin Belliveau, Hasbro senior vice president government, regulatory affairs and CSR. “Even though we made our packaging really sustainable and completely recyclable, in reading the news and testing with consumers, recycling doesn’t always happen,” Belliveau says. Based on their culture and principle “to avoid using unnecessary material” and “reduce environmental impact” in packaging, removing plastic all together seemed the most logical action. By 2022, the company plans to remove everything from the shrink-wrap encasing Monopoly and Operation game boxes to the polybags inside holding the game pieces, along with the blister packages imprisoning Avengers and Transformers action figures and thin plastic window sheets on Super Soaker boxes. This will only affect new products, not the ones currently on shelves. Two out of every three Hasbro products are new, so the effects should be visible quite quickly. Though what that looks like is still being figured out. “We have a very talented team of packaging engineers and designers who are exploring a variety of options for each type of product we create,” Belliveau says. “We look forward to sharing more details, including mockups, in the coming months and years as we continue on our journey.” The move is part of a broad strategy Hasbro been executing for the last 10 years, Belliveau says. Those marching orders can be summed up as “Leave the world a better place for children and their families” and “doing the right thing,” she says.   That’s the legacy Belliveau says the founding Hassenfeld Brothers left behind, and it’s as embedded in the culture as child-like imagination. “Sustainability is one of our core values,” Belliveau says. “Doing good to do well is really who we are and everyone we hire has that mindset. Getting people to buy into our values is very easy for us.” The toy company is completely serious about continuously reducing the environmental impact of its production and supply chain. Almost 99% of their entire electrical use across their facilities were balanced by buying 24,861 MWh of renewable energy certificates (RECs), while 90% of the packaging came from recycled material or sustainably managed forests. They also have a program set up with a recycling company called TerraCycle to convert old toys into building materials for playgrounds and park benches. Hasbro has also teamed with Amazon to create Frustration-Free Packaging, which cut the packaging material for Baby Alive dolls purchased online by 50%. Hasbro It’s easy to imagine every employee riding their bikes to work, composting leftover dinners in their backyard, and perhaps even summoning Captain Planet on occasion. But even if all that were true, making sweeping changes of a global manufacturer’s supply chain, one that tackles thousands of new products a year, “I don’t want to understate the complexity of this kind of initiative,” Belliveau interjects. “There are tremendous challenges anytime you make a bold leadership change in terms of how you design and make packaging.” She rattles off the potential for toys getting scratched or crushed in transit, and even when safely delivered intact to the retailer, theft prevention is a big concern. Then they must plan changes with vendors and suppliers, all different for the Playskool or action figure divisions. Then add to that all the iterative changes already taken place going from PVC to the new bioPET.   How do you talk even the most devout eco-friendly corporation I to such a move in such a short amount of time? Belliveau quickly has a response: “Build buy-in at all levels of the company, but first and foremost, the teams that actually have to execute, make sure they understand why are we doing this, how it aligns with our greater business model and core business, and ultimately present this to your CEO or leadership and get them to embrace it.” But perhaps most importantly, after those steps, the entire company must be in lock-step, all becoming cheerleaders for the cause who recognize the complexities and believe the move is a win-win. If Belliveau and the C-Suite are the only ones touting a green project’s merits, that’s a recipe for failure. “Sustainability initiatives, to be successful, they can’t be driven out of a corporate office, they really do have to be embraced by the entire organization,” she says. Let's block ads! (Why?)

Part 1: A Matter of Life & Death When anthropologists in the future are trying to pinpoint when exactly this society went off the rails— when we handed over our jobs, our livelihoods, our very agency, to machines— now looks to be a good place for them start. Maybe that's me being a cynical tech journalist apprehensive about my complicity if robots take over—because I wrote a story literally called "The Great Robot Takeover." I get agita thinking about all those successful use cases I’ve spotlighted where robots perform tasks better than humans. On the upside, I have positioned myself for a cushy job in the future robot government’s Ministry of Meatbag Propaganda. (Note to any algorithms searching for loyalists:  I for one welcome our new robot overlords.) Maybe I'm being melodramatic, but maybe I have just heard from one too many insiders enthusiastically dropping automation truth bombs. Take the time a few months ago I spoke with Craig Wilensky, CEO of logistics software provider JASCI: "They have found a way to engineer out people in almost every aspect of logistics," Wilensky happily reported when he called me from Automate/ProMat 2019 in April. "It is just amazing." He had a giddy disbelief about him, genuinely impressed at the new shuttle systems and automated solutions for unloading and loading trucks, picking and sorting products, and various other material handling applications. None of these are new, of course, but seeing them all in one giant marketplace, demonstrating how mature and hungry they are for more work, as well as their pervasiveness, was what struck him. They are everywhere and can do everything. From Wilensky's perspective, it's easy to see why this was so amazing. The cloud warehouse and order management platform JASCI developed is like the conductor for this automated orchestra, and the more instruments playing in concert, the more complex and compelling the arrangement. A warehouse managed by Ryder using Fetch Robotics, which look like tall Roombas, to transport materials saw a 25% increase in productivity and 20% in operating savings by cutting employee travel time. That walking could account for 30% of a worker's shift. But damned if one CEO's sweet sounds of success don’t sound like a death knell to most regular folks. A recent Oxford Economics report predicts by 2030 that 20 million manufacturing jobs around the world will be displaced, with 1.5 million in America. Even more troublesome, robots and A.I. could displace 40% of all jobs by 2035, according to Chinese VC Kai-Fu Lee on “60 Minutes.” It’s all radical, terrifying stuff. However, it begs a difficult question: If robots are the better worker, should we even mourn the loss of these jobs? For Whom the Bot Toils These robots toil for thee. All those smart automated guided vehicles (AGVs) shuffling pallets around like a Three-Card Monte dealer drive greater productivity, they don’t call in sick and rarely ever sexually harass each other. “All of the profits, none of the headaches,” I imagine monocle-wearing industrialists announce as they clink their champagne flutes together after new robots come online. But to those clinging to the bottom rung of the workforce ladder, a company's bottom line is far less important than staying out of the unemployment line. And if what Wilensky—a logistics expert with decades in the industry—says is true and all logistics jobs are at stake, that's a lot of jobs being automated. The entire supply chain has about 44 million, or 37% of the U.S. workforce, according to this Harvard Business Review piece. Those are obviously not all at risk, so for now, let's just stick with the 1.1 million warehouse and storage workers in America the Bureau of Labor Statistics says exist right now. What will become of them when drones are doing the barcode scanning on a regular basis and advances in A.I. allow robot arms to identify and pick objects to a level comparable to humans? What will happen to these people and their families? To their communities? There’s that melodrama again. This is something even Wilensky struggled with as recently as a few years ago. "What are these people going to do?" he recalled asking himself of how automation is impacting warehouse workers. "[Robots] are going to take their jobs and then they're going to be destitute." But his perspective has changed since then. "We're actually seeing the opposite right now," he said. "These are mundane jobs no one wants—pounding the concrete floor all day hurts your body even." Take into account how repetitive e-commerce picking jobs are and even one eight-hour shift takes a huge toll on the body and mind. Along with less enthusiasm for grueling work, there are just more options out there. Currently unemployment is at 3.7%, which is fantastic for the economy, but individual companies are finding it more difficult to fill open positions as humans become increasingly more selective. "One of driving facts is not cost anymore; companies just can't find people to do the job," Wilensky said. "That's all anyone is talking about at [Automate]." And automation has not been the first solution. Wilensky says mid-tier distributors and warehouses have tried raising wages, which often ranged from $9 to 12 two years ago. Many of JASCI's clients find that, even with an $18/hour wage, it can be tough to find talent. One of JASCI's clients in Nova Scotia was forced to automate despite it costing more. Why that is differs from person to person. I typically revert to "Millennials gonna' millennial," but a twentysomething might say these jobs are unfulfilling or too repetitive. Still, a good fork truck operator could earn $28/hour fully loaded (pay plus benefits). That's nearly $60,000 a year and still it's tough to find good workers throughout the industry. Some customers of Seegrid, a Pittsburgh-based manufacturer specializing in vision-guided pallet trucks, report a 300% turnover in material handling drivers. It’s a microcosm of the overall skills gap, in which several industries, from trucking to manufacturing, don’t have enough humans to do the work. Naturally, employers have turned to automation. The alternative is turning away customers and reducing the potential for growth, the exact opposite of how one should run a business. This way, companies often argue to me, they are able to generate more revenue and can afford to move those workers to skills better for humans, such as analyzing the logistical data and optimizing operations.  Automating people out obviously decreases turnover, though “sick days” would still exist—as robot downtime. When they are on the job, they vastly improve safety. Forklifts are involved in 34,000 serious injuries and 85 deaths a year, according to OSHA, yet another reason to imply their drivers are  on the way out. As of 2018, Seegrid’s autonomous pallet trucks have safely driven nearly 2 million miles at Whirlpool’s Clyde, Ohio plant and other manufacturers, the company says. And the first truly automated forklift, OTTO Motors OMEGA, arrives in 2020. OTTO Motors OMEGA, the first fully autonomous forklift. “The best way to create a safer work environment, when many issues are caused by forklifts, is to remove them entirely,” says OTTO Motors CEO Matt Rendall. Rendall suggests they could be available on a monthly term via a Mobility-as-a-Service model, so you could even hire them part-time or seasonally. Considering the cost of hiring and training, along with the unpredictability of humans, it's hard to fault warehouse or plant managers for terminating the organic element of the workforce where they can. It's only hard, though, because I don't rely on one of those jobs to feed my family. And despite my pandering to my future robot bosses, I still have a little empathy tucked away for emergencies. And that's exactly what this could turn into. Robots: The cause of, and solution to, all workforce’s problems? "Right now, robots are being fed the worst jobs," Wilensky told me. "I know it's only a matter of time before they take the better ones. Certainly, they will impact the job market— I don’t see a way to avoid that." That's that slippery slope. I knew it! We're all doomed. Or maybe we just have to work harder at relocating the lost workers. "We have to train people to have a bigger impact," says Wilensky, mentioning coding as one option. That of course isn’t an option for everybody, and a particularly difficult field for journalists to break into. I’m an advocate for providing the opportunity for everyone to learn to code, just as everyone has the opportunity in school to become an athlete. But not everyone can become a computer programmer, just as not everyone can hit a 90-mph curveball. All we can expect is the chance to stand in the batter’s box and find out. "We are so brainwashed by the market, that otherwise intelligent, well-meaning people will legitimately say we should retrain the coal miners to be coders," Andrew Yang remarked on the HBO Vice documentary, "The Future of Work." "Then twelve years from now AI is going to be able to do basic coding anyway. This is a race we will not win. The goalposts are going to move the whole time on us." Yang suggests a universal basic income, or “freedom dividend,” of $1,000/month for adults, which equates to $2.5 trillion a year, funded by a Value Added Tax. The Silicon Valley entrepreneur is polling at 1%, so the lower 49 might not be ready to adopt Alaska’s “free-money-for-everyone” policy just yet. The answer may be the thing causing the problem: robots. More specifically, building, fixing, operating, innovating all with robots. Maybe instead of a no-strings $1,000 monthly stipend, we invest in reskilling efforts instead. That coal miner might not learn to code, but they can learn to remote control robotic mining equipment, or to fix them by following an augmented reality troubleshooting guide. It’s time to put preconceived notions of what other people can and cannot do behind us based on their experience level. Billionaire reality show stars can become world leaders and Millennial bartenders can become among their greatest adversaries. Welcome to the 21stcentury. It’s a far cry from the American myths of yore. We all know the tall tale of John Henry—the classic man-vs.-machine allegory where the poor guy killed himself to prove a point. It's a story of determination, concentration, strength…and absolutely no long-term vision. He left a grieving widow behind and did nothing to slow industrialization. He could have just strolled into the factory where the steam drill was manufactured and gotten an assembly job. Henry could have retired happy and swung grandkids around instead of hammers. But he was afraid of the unknown, of where he would land after the reshuffling. It’s still a great story and you can’t fault him for that fear. Those that went through the first industrial revolution did not have the luxury of historical context. We are in the midst of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and know better by now. The "can't beat-em-join-em" strategy still applies today. Technical colleges across the country have adopted curriculum to fit the change in jobs, and these giant automation companies are partnering with them to ensure the new robotic workers have the support they need. I visited Cuyahoga Community College's Cleveland campus where companies such as Rockwell Automation have a guiding influence, while down south in Greenville, S.C., KUKA has supplied robots for the Greenville Technical College. These students get firsthand experience with the robots, which are used by the thousands over at BMW's Spartanburg plant, and thus, a chance at a decent wage working in this emerging skilled trade. This fully automated production line at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland, Ohio is used to train the next generation of skilled manufacturing workers. Earning a tech degree in robotics takes longer than getting forklift certification and requires investment on the part of the student and community. And not everybody is suited for the job, just as you can’t teach everyone to code. But we need to conscript as many able bodies to learn about robots and create new jobs and industries. Robot is as broad a term as computer or vehicle, with as much untapped potential. The alternative is ignoring the problem or slowing it down domestically with robot taxes or the promise of free money. If total and utter dominance is not the goal, than we risk relinquishing even more manufacturing work to competitors overseas. That’s why we should all be anxious. The robots poised to take all the jobs will likely be made overseas in Japan, Germany, China or even Denmark (where leading cobot maker Universal Robots is based). ABB (based in Zurich) and The Economist released an Automation Readiness Index in 2018 that listed America in 9th place out of 25 major economies in how prepared they are in terms of training, education and governmental policies. South Korea was first, while Canada, Estonia—and even France—beat us. We worked so hard to get to the point where we can shout "USA! USA!" anywhere in the world for any reason, and now look at us. To borrow from another fable, looks like this time we're the grasshopper, not the ant. Sliver of Hope When the Model T came on the scene, the tanners and farriers and other tradespeople who were no longer vital to transportation manufacturing and maintenance could at least find work in a factory that assembled cars or made tires or brakes. Today’s worker in America, unlike John Henry, doesn’t have as many options because we don’t manufacture a lot of robots here (though ABB opened one in 2015 in Auburn Hills, Mich.). Or maybe we don’t make a lot of robots here because aside from the handful of kids in the high school robotics club, no one wants to learn. We also don’t manufacture a lot of the parts to make robots, extricating our economy even further from the robot supply chain. And we won’t have the ecosystem to innovate new robot uses because our pool of skilled talent will be so shallow compared to Europe and Asia. It’s not completely bereft of hope, according to Jeff Burnstein, president of the Association for Advancing Automation (A3), who noted by email that America’s robotic systems integrators “rival those anywhere in the world,” and stalwarts such as ATI Industrial Automation and upstarts including Soft Robotics and RightHand Robotics have some of the most innovative end-effectors out there. [embedded content] Burnstein also mentioned the hubs of innovation growing in size and companies across the country, from Silicon Valley to Boston. I moderated an automation panel last year which included Burnstein and Soft Robotics CEO Carl Vause in Detroit, which is trying to shift gears from automobiles to automation, and come to think of it, was thoroughly impressed. Things might be O.K. after all, right? “We do have to aggressively prepare the workforce, however, and continue to invest in programs that make the U.S. globally competitive,” Burnstein concluded. “China, Japan, the E.U. and other countries are ‘all in’ on robotics and automation, the U.S. should be, too.” If you listen closely, that’s the faint ringing of the true death knell, the one sounding for America’s past dominance. Take a minute or two to grieve this fact, hold a micro-wake or sit a mini-Shiva, whatever you want. Then let’s all compose ourselves, forget about all the stats and rankings and surveys filling us with dread and panic, and find a way to create a new American way of life. Don’t worry. In part 2, we’ll have some ideas on how to do that. Let's block ads! (Why?)

Today, RealWear, Inc. announced it has landed $80 million in Series B funding from notable investors including Teradyne, Inc., Bose Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, and JPMorgan Chase & Co. Series A ($20 million) was led by Columbia Ventures Corporation. It's a huge milestone for the relatively new Augmented Reality startup, which started shipping its voice-operated HMT-1 (head-mounted tablet) in the summer of 2017. So far, they have sent out 15,000 units, which run on Android OS and have enabled more than 120 different production-augmenting apps. The use cases are growing exponentially in number and scale. Recently, BMW made a deal with RealWear and software partner Ubimax to deploy the HMT-1 at all 347 American BMW service centers to aid in maintenance and repair. Earlier this year, Shell announced it would use the intrinsically safe version, the HMT-1Z1, at 24 of its sites. As broadly as the specific applications can differ, they generally revolve around the three major categories: connecting with remote experts, displaying work instructions, or visualizing data. Several other devices do the same, from Google Glass Enterprise Edition to HoloLens. Both of those tech giants already have improved industry-centric 2.0 versions, the market the Vancouver, Washington-based RealWear went at from the beginning. So in a way, they were playing catchup to RealWear, which has no intention of slowing down or yielding its approximate 50% market share. That extra $80 million is the company's way of taping rockets to roller skates to blast ahead into uncharted territory for AR, but well-worn for past computing devices. The plan has two major parts: First, perfect the IT infrastructure that will allow enterprises to scale safer and easier. And second, create a subscription-based model to allow any company in the world to get their hands on—and heads in—a device that immediately connects the advantages of the digital transformation directly to workers without a huge capital expenditure or months of training. In that way, this isn’t just a big step for RealWear; it's a giant leap for AR over the trough of disillusionment. No one is more hyped about the news than Andy Lowery, the energetic AR evangelist at RealWear's helm. The CEO previously managed the nuclear propulsion operations for the USS John Stennis aircraft carrier and was president of DAQRI, an early entrant into the industrial AR world. We spoke with Lowery after the news was announced to talk about RealWear's trajectory and how it will impact businesses looking to leverage AR. Andy Lowery, CEO of RealWear, Inc. IW: What does this funding say about the AR industry? Andy Lowery: AR emerged circa 2013 seemingly out of nowhere. And what we then saw was we saw a flurry of AR investments, almost like piranhas. Anyone who had a unique player or slant or software or hardware, funding came very liberally too, and that includes DAQRI, my first company. More recently there's' been an awakening of a real perspective. The hype cycle for us has come and gone. We're not talking about pilots anymore. It's all about deployments. The people that diligenced RealWear are folks that would never come in early to an investment space, except for Qualcomm. Bose and Teradyne don’t typically look at companies that aren’t cash-flow positive and growth-oriented. Same is true of J.P. Morgan. The result of these investments will be really a new class of products. Zebra [Technologies] is looking into the space, Glass emerged recently with a $999 level product, and HoloLens continues to invent and advance in the industrial dimension. IW: So are you saying you're in the slope of enlightenment now? AL: We really are. This particular device class has crossed that chasm. Now we're taking a look at enabling and bundling, finding ways to deploy faster. The challenge that we’re facing is the ability to deploy tens of thousands of systems in a way that's safe and secure and stable. All these dams are about ready to break but there's one little thing we need to tweak. That means the system integration infrastructure, like mobile device management, and security that goes with putting devices on proprietary networks. All of those things are the hard, heavy lifting we're doing as a company. IW: What will you do with the new influx of money? AL: We're working on these very final steps with these big enterprises to get to the ten or twenty thousand-piece deployment level. It's not around questions if this will save us money. We're way beyond those conversations. We have program managers talking about customers, intentions to go to scale, budget and executive sponsors. These are the conversations we're trying to manage. It's super exciting that we're entering into this phase of supreme exponential growth as we're getting this in. It's all timed like a symphony coming to a crescendo at the perfect moment for us. And what you'll see our focus on, and some of the spend on this quarter is initiating RealWear as-a-Service. We'll begin to bundle software and devices as a service, and we have the finances and bank relationships to support that now to allow people to subscribe. IW: What made you want to go the "As-a-Service" route? AL: There's a necessity to bundle an offering and make it so bloody simple for mining companies in Argentina or Chile that want them on 1,000 employees, but can’t pay for them upfront because they are running on low margins. We just charge $50 per person and they order 1,000 immediately. It becomes an accelerant for our ability to get to scale. One or two uses they start seeing ROI and pretty soon they pay for the device on the savings they have. And take a look at modularity of head-worn systems. Every day I see a new optical waveguide company coming out of stealth that's going to change everything. I just read about one that doesn't have a lot of details, but they claim to have the highest pixel density of any display for near-eye in the market. You get those things coming out every other day, how do you develop a stable enterprise product that will last three to six years, which is what enterprises are expecting? You can’t do it with this consumer "let's-jump-on-the-next-shiny-bauble" methodology and approach. So I had to blend both worlds. Instead of releasing an HMT-2, that would have a set of fixed features, I would make it more modular. You could get a configuration that looks like the HMT-1 with all the upgrades, but you could also get one with a see-through display or camera or cellular band of your choice and start to use an accessory model like you did with the old desktop computers. That way you could maintain the consistency of the computers. That way you don’t have to switch the device out every time you have a new application that requires 5G, or a thermal camera or some see-through paradigm. IW: The AR/VR space is projected to have insane growth. Zion Market Research says CAGR will be 63% between this year and 2025. I imagine these devices and the various helpful hands-free applications could be of great use to contractors and DIYers. Thoughts? AL: That would be a magnificent outcome. I remember talking to someone from the AFLCIO about making union folks mentors for freelancers and the unions getting a fee. The same model can be used here. Rent an HMT from Home Depot with a water heater kit, and pay a little fee to a retired master electrician sitting at home on a tablet to help as needed. That is definitely an outcome that we're aiming for. IW: From a leadership perspective, what do you attribute the reason for success? AL: In aggregate, you need a great product, great timing, great people. For Realwear, we've taken a great product that has had more trials and tribulations, from starting out as the Kopin's Golden-i [wearable device] in 2007. No one has had that amount of detailed focused feedback and had time to iterate off of that. And secondly, our timing could not be better. Right when the world is starting to think digital, we show up on the scene. There is a bit of fate, there's serendipity and a lot of luck. And luck being of course opportunity meets perspiration. Now, where do we go? All of our mindshare is spent 100% on trying to stay ahead and be better than the competition and maintain and grow the market percentage. We'll need to occupy all sorts of use cases, or at least have an answer for them. You have to come into businesses with an identified solution, somewhat preconfigured. You want to leave them a little bit of optionality and have plug-and-play options, but I'm finding out you don’t want to lead with a science fair project with these big businesses and say I have the hardware and here are 120 different applications. Let's figure out which ones you want. It's a much better route to market to say, "Here's my recommendation, this is the whole package, this is who trains." And that's what we're going to test out this quarter. Let's block ads! (Why?)

The main purpose of the industrial exoskeleton, as with any piece of PPE, is to keep the workers safe, to keep them working. Granted, these are cool, sci-fi looking pieces of PPE that will have co-workers joke about Ellen Ripley (Aliens) or Tony Stark (Iron Man). But their primary mission is to prevent some of the costliest, most pervasive injuries—musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs)— which are caused simply by doing your job day in and day out for years and years. This could include reaching up to screw in 1,000 lightbulbs a day, or fastening parts to a car's undercarriage using an impact wrench. OSHA's 2014 report indicated one-third of all lost workdays in the U.S. were due to MSDs, largely preventable injuries that cost upwards of $20 billion in direct costs and $100 billion in indirect costs per year. More recently, the 2018 Liberty Mutual Workplace Safety Indexfound overexertion injuries alone carry a $13.7 billion annual cost and comprise 23% of the overall national burden. Toyota took the first steps in a revolutionary prevention strategy, possibly redefining American worker safety in the process. Last November, the automaker made exoskeletons mandatory personal protective equipment (PPE) for overhead work in its Toyota Canada plant in Ontario, and in March at Toyota Motor Manufacturing Indiana. More than 350 Levitate Airframe exoskeletons—metal and fabric devices worn like a backpack that brace the arms and reduce muscle fatigue during repetitive tasks—are in use at these two facilities for inspection and assembly. Levitate Airframe This could be the start of a new safety SOP that will not only keep workers from missing a few days or several months due to MSDs, like a torn rotator cuff, but also entice snowflakesyoung people back to historically intensive labor. Because wearable machines will be sharing the load, a hard day's work won’t be as hard on the body. This brand of lightweight passive exoskeleton was engineered by San Diego-based Levitate Technologies, originally designed as medical supports to assist surgeons for lengthy surgeries. Using a proprietary pulley system, they reduce muscle activity in shoulders and arms by 10-30%. That might not seem like much, but for workers holding a drill or welding torch (there's a fire-resistant version available) above their head most of the day is truly significant. Studies show it's enough to delay the onset of fatigue and improve worker quality over a longer period.  Data collected from virtual welding simulator at Vermeer showed an expert welder wearing the Airframe doubled his weld accuracy score from the test he did two days prior without it, which started to decline towards the end of that initial 90-minute session. An Iowa State study conducted at Toyota Canada using electromyography (EMG) "found a 20% average reduction in muscle load," explains Joseph Zawaideh, Levitate’s VP of Marketing and Business Development. A similar scientific study was done at two John Deere sites. The Airframe had previously earned a CE marking for PPE in Europe and has been used at BMW's Spartanburg, S.C., plant for overhead assembly, like using a pneumatic drill for fastening tasks. With the preponderance of positive lab results, it's not hard to see why Toyota would kick the tires on the tech as a permanent solution. And as manufacturers have copied the Toyota Production system, they may play follow the leader here as well. They have plenty of options from which to choose. Expanding Field The arm-assist subgroup alone has several worthy competitors being used at manufacturers around the world. Levitate says the Airframe alone is at 100 companies. And it's certainly not the only player in the category. Ford, which has also deployed the Airframe at its engine and transmission plants, is halfway through a two-year study to vet the efficacy of the EksoVest, a competing upper body exoskeleton. The automaker is also experimenting with the suitX ShoulderX V3 and Ottobock Paexo. suitX ShoulderX V3 This is the third version of the ShoulderX, and the company has attached a cooling fan to the back to make wearing the device a less sweaty affair. "Worker's acceptance is a huge deal. If they don’t like it, they don’t wear it," says suitX CEO Homayoon Kazerooni, the man largely responsible with developing the modern exoskeleton 20 years ago for the military. And with acceptance comes the two-fold benefit of safer and more productive workers. That's at least what wind turbine manufacturer Siemens Gamesa is looking to achieve with their ShoulderX deployments at their facilities. "Ideally, we will see a lower level of injuries and tiredness and a higher level of productivity, showing that you can do good for the company and do good for your employees at the same time," says Claus Lindberg Nielsen, head of tooling at Siemens Gamesa. "We always aim to improve our employee health and working conditions and if we can do that, and at the same time save 30 seconds on a process that is repeated 1,000 times, that truly is a win for all." Raising Up the Workforce Ottobock, a century-old prosthetics manufacturer which entered the industrial exo market last October with the 4-lb. Paexo, mentions on its website that in 2017, specifically for the European building industry, more than one in four (27%) of sick days were due to musculoskeletal injuries. For building and drywall construction, it was one in three. Porsche assembly workers use the Ottobock Paexo in the Leipzig, Germany factory. That makes sense because a muscle injury takes a lot longer to recover from than the much more common flu. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, MSDs require "a median of 11 days away from work to recover." And rotator cuff surgery could put  a worker out of commission for three to eight months, (more if you’re the best company softball pitcher and they spring for Tommy John surgery). Obviously, it's in the best interest of everyone— from the workman's comp provider to the plant manager to the actual worker—to avoid these injuries.  But it's even more vital to keep employees healthy in the face of an ever-widening skills gap. According to the 2014 Manufacturing Skills & Training Study, "80% of manufacturers report[ed] a moderate or serious shortage of qualified applicants for skilled and highly skilled production positions." The Manufacturing Institute and Deloitte's 2018 Skills Gap study found that less than half of the 4.6 open manufacturing jobs over the next decade will be filled. And specifically, for production workers, it has taken a third longer in 2018 to place a vacant position (93 days) than in 2015 (70 days). According to OfficeTeam, 87% of U.S. workers age 18-34 (Millennials) factor health and wellness offerings in making a job decision. For 55+, it's only 44%. A company that wants to attract the largest pool of talent needs to stand out in this category, and exoskeletons not only transfer loads and torque, but also their inherent "cool" factor directly to the employer investing in them. And it's a small investment all things considered. The predicted future GDP loss is in the trillions, but this next stat courtesy of the National Association of Manufacturers drops a crushing reality: In Q1 of this year, one out of every four manufacturers turned down new business opportunities because they lacked the workers. This year. Now. The year Blade Runner took place, when we thought androids and flying cars would solve all our problems, we can’t keep loyal workers on the line busting their butts from bursting their bursas. They are recovering from surgery while sales is in meltdown mode because they lost a huge commission. That's the clear and present danger, and automation cannot always be the solution. Robots and automated machines have become indispensable tools in certain simple and light applications, but more often than not, they can't mimic the value of even your weakest worker. As a bit of proof, Deloitte says only 53% of those surveyed for the 2018 Global Human Capital Trends report are "redesigning work around automation." If robots were the panacea to address the workforce issues of the next decade, you'd expect that number to be higher. For now, at least, people are still powering production, and despite the depressing stats, the rise of industrial exoskeletons should have us all feeling a bit more upbeat. "It's getting a step closer to becoming mainstream,” Zawaideh says of the exoskeleton reaching PPE status. “You're not going to say this is a great piece of innovation anymore; it's going to be like safety glasses.” [embedded content] The main purpose of the industrial exoskeleton, as with any piece of PPE, is to keep the workers safe, to keep them working. Granted, these are cool, sci-fi looking pieces of PPE that will have co-workers joke about Ellen Ripley (Aliens) or Tony Stark (Iron Man). But their primary mission is to prevent some of the costliest, most pervasive injuries—musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs)— which are caused simply by doing your job day in and day out for years and years. This could include reaching up to screw in 1,000 lightbulbs a day, or fastening parts to a car's undercarriage using an impact wrench. OSHA's 2014 report indicated one-third of all lost workdays in the U.S. were due to MSDs, largely preventable injuries that cost upwards of $20 billion in direct costs and $100 billion in indirect costs per year. More recently, the 2018 Liberty Mutual Workplace Safety Indexfound overexertion injuries alone carry a $13.7 billion annual cost and comprise 23% of the overall national burden. Toyota took the first steps in a revolutionary prevention strategy, possibly redefining American worker safety in the process. Last November, the automaker made exoskeletons mandatory personal protective equipment (PPE) for overhead work in its Toyota Canada plant in Ontario, and in March at Toyota Motor Manufacturing Indiana. More than 350 Levitate Airframe exoskeletons—metal and fabric devices worn like a backpack that brace the arms and reduce muscle fatigue during repetitive tasks—are in use at these two facilities for inspection and assembly. Levitate Airframe This could be the start of a new safety SOP that will not only keep workers from missing a few days or several months due to MSDs, like a torn rotator cuff, but also entice snowflakesyoung people back to historically intensive labor. Because wearable machines will be sharing the load, a hard day's work won’t be as hard on the body. This brand of lightweight passive exoskeleton was engineered by San Diego-based Levitate Technologies, originally designed as medical supports to assist surgeons for lengthy surgeries. Using a proprietary pulley system, they reduce muscle activity in shoulders and arms by 10-30%. That might not seem like much, but for workers holding a drill or welding torch (there's a fire-resistant version available) above their head most of the day is truly significant. Studies show it's enough to delay the onset of fatigue and improve worker quality over a longer period.  Data collected from virtual welding simulator at Vermeer showed an expert welder wearing the Airframe doubled his weld accuracy score from the test he did two days prior without it, which started to decline towards the end of that initial 90-minute session. An Iowa State study conducted at Toyota Canada using electromyography (EMG) "found a 20% average reduction in muscle load," explains Joseph Zawaideh, Levitate’s VP of Marketing and Business Development. A similar scientific study was done at two John Deere sites. The Airframe had previously earned a CE marking for PPE in Europe and has been used at BMW's Spartanburg, S.C., plant for overhead assembly, like using a pneumatic drill for fastening tasks. With the preponderance of positive lab results, it's not hard to see why Toyota would kick the tires on the tech as a permanent solution. And as manufacturers have copied the Toyota Production system, they may play follow the leader here as well. They have plenty of options from which to choose. Expanding Field The arm-assist subgroup alone has several worthy competitors being used at manufacturers around the world. Levitate says the Airframe alone is at 100 companies. And it's certainly not the only player in the category. Ford, which has also deployed the Airframe at its engine and transmission plants, is halfway through a two-year study to vet the efficacy of the EksoVest, a competing upper body exoskeleton. The automaker is also experimenting with the suitX ShoulderX V3 and Ottobock Paexo. suitX ShoulderX V3 This is the third version of the ShoulderX, and the company has attached a cooling fan to the back to make wearing the device a less sweaty affair. "Worker's acceptance is a huge deal. If they don’t like it, they don’t wear it," says suitX CEO Homayoon Kazerooni, the man largely responsible with developing the modern exoskeleton 20 years ago for the military. And with acceptance comes the two-fold benefit of safer and more productive workers. That's at least what wind turbine manufacturer Siemens Gamesa is looking to achieve with their ShoulderX deployments at their facilities. "Ideally, we will see a lower level of injuries and tiredness and a higher level of productivity, showing that you can do good for the company and do good for your employees at the same time," says Claus Lindberg Nielsen, head of tooling at Siemens Gamesa. "We always aim to improve our employee health and working conditions and if we can do that, and at the same time save 30 seconds on a process that is repeated 1,000 times, that truly is a win for all." Raising Up the Workforce Ottobock, a century-old prosthetics manufacturer which entered the industrial exo market last October with the 4-lb. Paexo, mentions on its website that in 2017, specifically for the European building industry, more than one in four (27%) of sick days were due to musculoskeletal injuries. For building and drywall construction, it was one in three. Porsche assembly workers use the Ottobock Paexo in the Leipzig, Germany factory. That makes sense because a muscle injury takes a lot longer to recover from than the much more common flu. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, MSDs require "a median of 11 days away from work to recover." And rotator cuff surgery could put  a worker out of commission for three to eight months, (more if you’re the best company softball pitcher and they spring for Tommy John surgery). Obviously, it's in the best interest of everyone— from the workman's comp provider to the plant manager to the actual worker—to avoid these injuries.  But it's even more vital to keep employees healthy in the face of an ever-widening skills gap. According to the 2014 Manufacturing Skills & Training Study, "80% of manufacturers report[ed] a moderate or serious shortage of qualified applicants for skilled and highly skilled production positions." The Manufacturing Institute and Deloitte's 2018 Skills Gap study found that less than half of the 4.6 open manufacturing jobs over the next decade will be filled. And specifically, for production workers, it has taken a third longer in 2018 to place a vacant position (93 days) than in 2015 (70 days). According to OfficeTeam, 87% of U.S. workers age 18-34 (Millennials) factor health and wellness offerings in making a job decision. For 55+, it's only 44%. A company that wants to attract the largest pool of talent needs to stand out in this category, and exoskeletons not only transfer loads and torque, but also their inherent "cool" factor directly to the employer investing in them. And it's a small investment all things considered. The predicted future GDP loss is in the trillions, but this next stat courtesy of the National Association of Manufacturers drops a crushing reality: In Q1 of this year, one out of every four manufacturers turned down new business opportunities because they lacked the workers. This year. Now. The year Blade Runner took place, when we thought androids and flying cars would solve all our problems, we can’t keep loyal workers on the line busting their butts from bursting their bursas. They are recovering from surgery while sales is in meltdown mode because they lost a huge commission. That's the clear and present danger, and automation cannot always be the solution. Robots and automated machines have become indispensable tools in certain simple and light applications, but more often than not, they can't mimic the value of even your weakest worker. As a bit of proof, Deloitte says only 53% of those surveyed for the 2018 Global Human Capital Trends report are "redesigning work around automation." If robots were the panacea to address the workforce issues of the next decade, you'd expect that number to be higher. For now, at least, people are still powering production, and despite the depressing stats, the rise of industrial exoskeletons should have us all feeling a bit more upbeat. "It's getting a step closer to becoming mainstream,” Zawaideh says of the exoskeleton reaching PPE status. “You're not going to say this is a great piece of innovation anymore; it's going to be like safety glasses.” [embedded content] And to push the effort along even more, ASTM International, which is working on creating exoskeleton standards, just announced an RFP for an Exo Technologies Center of Excellence that would spur exosuit and exoskeleton innovation, act as a hub for education and training and coordinate global partnerships. For support, the winning bid will get $250,000 annually for up to five years including funds and in-kind contributions, ASTM says. Proposals are welcome from R&D entities, universities, government agencies, and other stakeholders worldwide. Letters of intent are due June 27 with any questions due June 28.  An informational webinar will follow July 2 for applicants, whose full proposals are due July 29. The winning proposal will be announced no earlier than September. Let's block ads! (Why?)

Everything in our society seems to be getting smarter. Fridges. Factories. Cities. They demand more sensors, more data, more everything. This puts Boeing in an unenviable position as a manufacturer, as it must push for continuous improvement and advancement in making new aircrafts. (It's as yet unclear what happened to cause the recent 737 Max 8 passenger jet crash in Ethiopia, or a similar tragedy off the coast of Indonesia last October, but at the manufacturing level, the goal is to commit zero mistakes, despite how complex the job becomes.) In the case of the KC-767 refueling tanker, the job is very complex. Each requires aircraft mechanics to install "2.5 times the wiring in one times the plane," explains Brian Laughlin, IT technical fellow at Boeing. The task often required workers to recall directions from a 2D, 20-foot-or-longer paper diagram and translate them to the 3D world. To make matters worse, those wires are packed in quite tight. And if the mechanic messes up, the bundles of cable must all be undone to correct the error. Correction: Not if, but when. "In the past we had quite a few mistakes made," says Laughlin, though it's not due to malfeasance but rather humans' shortcomings. "The things we're asking them to do are nearly superhuman; it's really, really tough."The true problem is that everything is getting smarter except for us. Even our brains, which have allowed us to do so much, have their limits.Laughlin, who holds a Ph.D. in human factors and a master's degree in experimental psychology, knows all about the brain's limitations, such as in memory, as humans have trouble even retaining simple seven-digit phone numbers, let alone the schematics needed to install miles of wire in a jet. His job is to find the right technology to overcome them, leading to Boeing's use of the Microsoft HoloLens headset, which allowed them to transfer the 3D work instructions directly into their workspace via a high-tech visor."It essentially makes us bionic," Laughlin says of the HoloLens. "It addresses a lot of problems that we as humans have in terms of how we recall, compare and process information."The HoloLens employs what Microsoft calls mixed reality, an advanced form of immersive computing (which also includes augmented and virtual reality) that overlays digital 3D images onto the visor in a way that makes these digital assets appear as part of the real world. This is done through Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), a tech also used by robots and drones for navigation. There's no end to how the tech can be applied, with fascinating cases in medicine and design. The U.S. Army awarded Microsoft a $480 million contract and plans to use the HoloLens for training and combat."We have unlocked super-powers for hundreds of thousands of people who go to work every day," says Greg Sullivan, director of communications at Microsoft. "HoloLens is changing how we work, learn, communicate and get things done."Boeing was Microsoft's first industrial partner with the HoloLens, which was released in 2016. Laughlin, who has been with Boeing since 1991, also points out that Boeing innovators Tom Caudell and David Mizell coined the term augmented reality in the 1990s. They developed early iterations of smartglasses to assemble wiring looms for the 777, overlaying digital images onto peg boards.In the current application, mixed reality makes that superhuman memory game into child's play, inserting ghost wiring into the electrician's field of view that they then need to trace with the actual cables."I can just walk in and put on the HoloLens and then there's my wiring harness floating in space," Laughlin explains. "Then I just connect the dots with the wiring harness. It's far simpler and easier to understand."Easy, yes, but more importantly, it's effective."Our theory studies have shown a 90% improvement in first-time quality when compared to using two-dimensional information on the airplane, along with a 30% reduction in time spent doing a job," says Paul Davies, Boeing Research & Technology associate technical fellow.Besides not having to keep referring to the paper diagram, the error-proofing method also saves time from having to correct improper wiring. "I don't want to unduly lead people to believe that you go buy HoloLens and suddenly everything magically becomes better, because clearly it does not," Laughlin says. "The magic comes in actually going and doing the process work ahead of time so that you really understand what the process flows are and what each step entails, and then take a wire brush and strip away all the waste that you can out of that."Once the process is as lean as possible, Lauglin says, that's when you drop in the right technology."What you tend to get is a force multiplier instead of an added benefit," Laughlin says.Boeing has previously used Google Glass Enterprise Edition in conjunction with software made by Upskill to cut production time by 30%, reduce errors to almost zero and potentially save millions per jet. If they simply went with what worked, Laughlin says the results could have been vastly different. Understanding "the core why" helped the team figure out that the true mixed-reality solution would be better than the Glass way—looking at static work instructions in the corner of the worker's eye."They're all just tools; there's not one better than the other," says Laughlin, likening the different wearable computers to hammers and screwdrivers."The key is the correctly match between requirements and capabilities." The New Fashion TrendThat's just one use case in one company. Forrester predicted in 2016 that 14 million workers would use smart glasses and similar devices to increase performance by 2025. Think of all the things you can do with a smart phone or tablet, like check work instructions, scan bar codes, record video or make a call. Now imagine tying all that into your system's cloud, not needing to use your hands to access any of it.The new wave of industrial wearables comes in several form factors. Industrialized versions range from under $2,000 to more than $5,000. They do require serious planning, app building and extensive collaboration between IT and operations. The result: the instant evolution of the industrial worker. This empowers people to catch up to all those other smart plant assets growing at an exponential rate.You probably know about the insane upswing the Internet of Things is projected to take in the next few years. According to Statista, the number of connected devices will nearly triple between now and 2025, to 75 billion. In the plant and across every business, all those connected things will be creating hot new data streams, which amounts to a bunch of wasted steam if you can’t convert it into actionable data. These headsets and smartglasses essentially funnel that data when appropriate to the boots-on-the-ground workers who put it to use, a reason analysts predict the popularity of enterprise wearables to match that of the IIoT. The industrial wearable segment was $1.5 billion in 2017, and MarketWatch expects it to rise by 73%, to $2.6 billion in 2023.But how will they make a difference? Where? In the 1990s, as AOL spammed our snail-mail boxes with free trial discs, no one could have predicted how the internet would evolve in 20 years. Likewise, the array of face-hugging tech available have equal potential to redefine how manufacturers interface with their machines.Fixing Old ProblemsThinking of wearable computers as different tools on your belt is even more appropriate considering how mainstream they will be in maintenance and field service. Research & Markets projects that in five years, the market for using AR in maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) applications will grow from $403.3 million to $3.31 billion."If an error code pops up, their technician can get instant live support or visual guidance on smart glasses or mobile devices, which results in 90% lower search times," says Dirk Schart, president of Re’flekt, of a recent success story his AR software solutions provider had with one of the world's leading automation companies."The risk of errors in both, routine repair and maintenance procedures as well as in complex tasks, can be reduced by up to 40%," he adds.Even the most basic pairs of smart glasses have the features needed to achieve these results and greatly cut machine downtime: a camera, wireless connectivity and a display window.With these tools attached to their faces, workers can livestream a repair or install to a remote expert who can see exactly what is going on and recommend actions verbally or through telestrations. Fixes can be made without having to hold a smartphone or tablet.This hands-free function is the most important factor and why wearables could phase out tablets in the next few years. That's not so bold a claim if you are familiar with the success of RealWear, a Vancouver-based "knowledge transfer" company that manufactures the ruggedized HMT-1, (short for "head-mounted tablet"). They also have an intrinsically safe version for refineries and other volatile spaces. Both are 100% voice-operated. RealWear President Sanjay Jhawar says globally there are about 100 million workers in manufacturing and the service economy who use their hands, so that 14 million number put out by Forester a few years back may seem low. In less than two years, RealWear has amassed more than 800 enterprise customers and sold more than 10,000 units.Last October, Colgate Palmolive announced it has concluded pilot programs at eight sites and hundreds of mechanics and engineers across 20 facilities would use the HMT-1, which is 100% voice operated.For competitive advantage reasons, Colgate has been cagey on specifics, but Jhawar explains that they have been used on their toothpaste bottling line to prevent loss of production. If a bent panel causes a shutdown, the technician might not immediately notice, but a real expert knows what to look for. It's the speed and ease of IT Help desk for your machines."You can avoid a plane trip if the  vendor can see," Jhawar says. "It really allows the person to take a look at it from all angles."He says Colgate has reduced downtime from an hour to 15 minutes in some cases, and that the tech pays for itself in one use.When you're refining oil, not toothpaste, the ROI increases, RealWear CEO Andy Lowery says."If you have that wheel platform pump get back up and running in six days versus 12 days, you just made yourself $3 million more dollars in revenue," Lowery says.Focus on the FutureYou don’t have to look hard to see a wide variety of industrial use cases for smartglasses, but the present breed of bionic worker is still a bit crude. The advance of 5G could push their use right into a wearable renaissance.Two-way telepresence requires 5 to 25 Mbps, while a bandwidth of 200 to 5,000 Mbps will be needed for a more immersive 6 Degree of Freedom video, says ABI Research. This threshold should be more attainable with the new supercharged network. According to Verizon, a 5G network increases throughput 10-fold, decreases latency by the same amount, while improving network traffic capacity and efficiency by 100 times.As higher speed connections drove more video onto the Internet, eventually leading to YouTube and Netflix, 5G should have the same impact on AR and VR. Scientists, however, have raised serious concerns about long-term exposure to the electromagnetic frequencies emitted by 5G—which could possibly cause cancer—so strapping a receiver right to your head would be on the list of things to avoid.But neither fear of technology nor faith in it should determine whether now is the right time to enhance your workers with wearable computers. That's a point Laughlin has gleaned from many years of experience."If you focus on the process, that's how you future-proof your company," he says. "It's never about technology, because technology changes almost daily.""If I can guarantee you anything, it's that something will out-HoloLens the HoloLens," Laughlin concludes.He's right, as the HoloLens 2 was recently announced, with improved ergonomics, a flip-up visor, expanded field of view and better eye tracking. And in the coming years there will be several more devices at different price points and levels of quality and comfort, and companies will probably feel some serious growing pains as they figure out how to execute their bionic plan.As they do, it would be wise to remember what all this is for. Productivity? Efficiency? Quality? Yes. Yes. And yes. But more than that, we're learning to offshore all the cognitive workload, like memorizing detailed diagrams and calculating complex equations, to AI assistants that will be able to predict and autonomously perform actions.This would allow brains to excel at what they do best, such as abstraction of thought and pattern recognition, Laughlin says. In short, by becoming closer to the machines, we will have the capability to become more of what makes us human.And like at the dawn of civilization, when humans started figuring out what to do with fire, we are at a point of unlimited potential."We're still getting our feet underneath us about understanding this whiz bang AR/VR stuff," Laughlin says. "Just wait until we start integrating across all these verticals. It's going to blow people's minds." Let's block ads! (Why?)

Luckily for industrial workers everywhere, Lt. Edward Wheatley Bullard of the U.S. Cavalry climbed out of the French trenches with an idea that would spark the industrial safety movement: the hard hat. Bullard, the son of a mining equipment supplier, was inspired by the metal helmets doughboys wore to deflect the hail of bullets raining down on them courtesy of the Kaiser. When he returned home, he invented the first commercially available industrial hard hat, called the Hard Boiled hat. Prior to its invention and subsequent production in San Francisco, gold and copper miners in California and Nevada basically wore leather caps—which might not be all that good at stopping hail, let alone the rocks or tools potentially pouring down on them. Now one hundred years later, Bullard's great granddaughter, current Bullard CEO Wells Bullard, recounts how this now 100-year-old equipment was invented and how it redefined protecting the workforce. NED: What's the Hard Boiled Hat's origin story? Wells Bullard: My great grandfather, E.W. Bullard, was exposed to miners his whole life because his dad supplied them with equipment such as carbide lamps. When he was in the U.S. Cavalry during World War I, he wore one of those metal doughboy helmets in the trenches, so he came back and pointed out to his dad that miners were only wearing canvass caps at that point, and they faced very similar hazards to what he saw in the war. For miners it was falling rock and ore, or tools dropped by workers higher up in the mine. Bullard The Hard Boiled Hat: 1919 edition As an inventor, he was very user focused and understood the miners couldn’t afford metal helmets. And metal was a lot heavier and they didn’t need to be protected against bullets. So he invented the Hard Boiled Hat, which was made with steamed, or hard-boiled, canvass, leather, glue, and a very elementary suspension. It was shellacked with black paint. NED: You still have a couple around. What does it feel like? WB: People's heads were much smaller, due to nutrition, so you can’t wear the helmet. And it's not easy to adjust. It doesn’t easily ratchet like modern helmets. The brim is just smooth leather, flexible but rigid. You could hear your hand knocking on it, but it flexes. The suspension was a piece of folded-over leather that went around the entire head, connected to string that was tied into the top of the helmet. It feels very lightweight. What else can you say about the manufacturing? The factory was south of Market Street in San Francisco. In about 1925, Bullard put out an advertisement that celebrated the lowering of prices of the hard hats, and that was all because they know had machines. He had brought in machinery and automation, but I'm not sure if it was to help with the hard-boiling process or the sewing of components. I do think it was pretty incredible he used machines back then to scale up and then marketed them as a benefit for users, to keep prices down. NED: What was the perception of safety back then? WB: OSHA didn’t come around until the early 1970s, so those first mining customers who used hard hats in the 1920s were really progressive employers, because they thought about protecting their employees and thought about and really invested in safety. Back then workers were somewhat considered disposable; there was somebody else always ready to do the job if you couldn’t do it. It wasn't like today when you think about work life balance. NED: How did Bullard get involved with the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge in the 1930s? WB: Bridge engineer Joseph B. Strauss was very safety minded. At that point, for every $1 million of bridge construction project, there was a death. And it was going to be an almost $40 million project. Strauss thought it was unacceptable to have 40 people die, so he implemented a whole bunch of safety provisions including firing people on the spot for "showboating. It was very common for men working on these projects to do things that were pretty dangerous. It may have impressed coworkers, but Strauss had zero tolerance for that. He also implemented a safety net under the bridge that saved several lives. And he worked directly with my great grandfather to change the design of the hard hat a bit and reinforce it to protect against falling rivets. Keystone | Getty Images This photo was taken in 1930 during the construction of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Talk about service, by golly! Every worker on the bridge wore one, and it was the first designated construction area that required the use of hard hats. Strauss found his workers were much more efficient, productive and effective because they were really confident. And there were no deaths due to head injuries from falling objects. Bullard The Golden Gate Bridge was the first construction site that mandated hard hats. NED: How has the approach to safety evolved? WB: The point of focus on safety in general trend toward not just focusing on immediate hazards but on long-term wellness and health. What are the effects of wearing something very heavy over time? You're thinking about the ergonomics and the wear and tear on bodies. And in terms of comfort, there's' been a lot of evolution. My great grandfather invented the first supplied air respirator during the Golden Gate Bridge construction to protect workers sandblasting steel from breathing in these particles. It was canvass over hard hat, with a  window cut out and a piece of glass in there, along with a respirator. It was pretty elementary, but our respirator today has cooling and heating to allow workers to be more comfortable. It allows them to work safer and more comfortably. Bullard The first self-contained respirator invented by E.W Bullard for use on building the Golden Gate Bridge. The big change to hard hats is the availability of new materials that offer extreme durability and lightweight designs. Safety equipment is only effective when worn. In order for people to wear it, they have to be comfortable. One thing that hasn’t changed is that we're still selling people peace of mind, so they could confidently go about their work. Let's block ads! (Why?)