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StrongArm R&D Team’s Leadership Secures 2 Critical Patents to Advance Worker Safety Industry

Here are the latest advances in our safety technology roadmap — and what’s coming next.

StrongArm pioneered the industrial safety wearables space nearly a decade ago, beginning with a problem of achieving zero workplace injuries and working our way into an effective solution through leading-edge technology. By nature, then as now, our business is one that relies on constant and rigorous research, testing, iteration and development.

We’ve come a long way as a team and a company. We’re not a scrappy startup anymore. We’re approaching 150 employees. We recently raised $50 million in Series B funding. Our customer base has never been larger or represented by more industry leading companies

R&D is in our DNA. Going forward, however, it will play a larger role in shaping who we are and how we prevent injuries for the world’s Industrial Athletes

Over the past quarter, we’ve been hard at work innovating and pushing the boundaries of our safety wearable sensors and of the corresponding SafeWork System to accommodate the evolving needs of the Industrial Athlete. 

As part of our ongoing commitment to R&D, in addition to our fifteen patents granted worldwide,  we have recently received allowances in two patent applications covering new aspects of the SafeWork System, with five more pending. These represent pillar technologies in the safety wearable space and are foundational to our mission of protecting the world’s Industrial Athletes.

The first pertains to activity classification. Our technology intuitively understands how Industrial Athletes are moving — holding an object, bending down, walking, lifting, stretching and other suitable actions — in their physical environments so our teams can tailor safety solutions accordingly.

For example, if an Industrial Athlete worked in a retail warehouse, moving boxes for their job, their everyday movements and the stress on their body would be different than if they worked in an automobile manufacturing plant, building cars for their job. When physical injuries develop over time, knowledge about individual activities and their risk factors mitigates their risk with proactive safety training for those specific activities so Athletes remain their healthiest.

‍The second patent covers injury prediction. The technology in this patent can classify a worker’s motion into categories like “Injury Motion” versus “Non-Injury Motion” using machine learning models, which learn this behavior based on the millions of hours of motion data StrongArm has collected. 

For example, predicting a movement as one that could lead to injury is a complex task with multiple measurable and non measurable factors involved. Our technology is capable of detecting certain patterns of human motion which are injury leading factors – like repetitive deep bends, fast twists and uncomfortable stretches or tilts – and categorizing these movements as Injury Motions. After repetitive Injury Motions, our technology can identify that an Industrial Athlete is at risk and alert them to change their behavior. 

As we continue the push toward our mission of protecting the world’s Industrial Athletes, the guiding philosophy of the R&D team remains the same. We believe most of the risks faced by Industrial Athletes can be solved by leveraging and extending existing technologies we have at our disposal. We focus on the problem, not the solution, and are confident that with enough hard work and innovation we can make every workplace significantly safer.

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Siva Bomireddy | Director, R&D

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