By now, you’ve likely heard of artificial intelligence and machine learning. You may not realize, however, how prevalent they are in your daily life—or the power they have to advance workplace health and safety initiatives, making it more likely that workers will come home at the end of the day, injury-free, to their families.
We’re surrounded by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) through our phones, computers, and the whole of the Internet. When you interact with things like customer service chatbots or technologies that mimic human intelligence to complete a task, you’re interacting with AI. Machine learning is an application of AI that helps a piece of technology “learn” from the data available to it to improve its performance, like recommendations from streaming TV or music services.
Here’s an application you might be less familiar with: imagine software that uses AI and machine learning to reduce your risk of developing a musculoskeletal disorder (MSD), so that you can stay healthy at work; a system that guides you to the best workstation improvements that let you do your job more comfortably.
Through ActiveEHS®, VelocityEHS is making this a reality. ActiveEHS is a proprietary methodology that combines the deep domain expertise of VelocityEHS certified EHS/ESG professionals with technology like AI to foster a continuous improvement cycle of prediction and intervention. It helps non-experts produce expert-level results and creates positive EHS outcomes for all who employ it.
Let’s look at ActiveEHS through the lens of ergonomics, and what it can mean for you and your workers.
VelocityEHS® Industrial Ergonomics has been using artificial intelligence in our sensorless motion-capture software to accurately assess physical movement and MSD risk areas for some time, but many organizations using the system don’t have on-staff ergonomists. Recognizing that EHS teams also need guidance to accurately identify the root causes of musculoskeletal disorder risks, along with the best controls for reducing those risks, we’ve now enhanced our ergonomics software to provide users with suggested causes and recommended controls. This in-system guidance is based on decades’ worth of experience and data collected from hundreds of global enterprise customers.
EHS generalists and on-site ergonomics teams now have the advantage of expert-level knowledge at their fingertips to make changes that have the greatest positive impact for their organization. With ActiveEHS, non-experts can do more to better prevent MSD risk, reduce overall injury costs, drive productivity, and provide employees with quality-of-life changing improvements in the workplace.
Here’s a practical example, from a worker’s perspective. Imagine for a moment that you have back pain, attributed to years of performing a task at your workstation. Your workplace has implemented VelocityEHS Industrial Ergonomics to improve employee health and lower the risk of MSDs, so you can assess your specific MSD risk level. You perform an assessment and enter additional the details of your workstation and job task (your risk causes); then based on data from other people around the world who have experienced the same problem, you would quickly be given recommended changes to your workstation (your way to control the risk level), like readjusting the height of your workbench or shelves.
A key benefit of Industrial Ergonomics — and the Accelerate Platform in general — is the leveraging of “network effects.” Meaning, as more people that use the solution, the more valuable it becomes to all users. As users interact with the software and enter their own risk causes and improvement controls, the system will learn from the information entered.
But what makes ActiveEHS truly special is that it’s not just data working alone. In addition to AI and machine learning, our experts are continuously improving our solutions through their own rigorous research and hard-won insights working on the ground with many of the world’s most recognized companies. This allows VelocityEHS to not only identify industry trends and opportunities for improvement, but more importantly, to insert those insights quickly into the product where they can do the most good.
The solutions within Accelerate were designed and developed by certified experts, at every level, across the domains of environmental, health & safety (EHS) and artificial intelligence. With ActiveEHS, we’re building upon their knowledge with the advancements of AI and machine learning to empower employees and companies to work safely and more sustainably. That way they can not only come home to their families at the end of the day and maybe watch the Netflix series that machine learning has been recommending, but they can also work comfortably and live healthfully for a long, long time to come.
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