Sean Petterson, founder and CEO of StrongArm Technologies
As the coronavirus restrictions are easing across the world, one of the most challenging aspects of balancing the health threats and normalizing the economy will be the safety of workers going back to their jobs.
Blue-collar workers are at a particularly high risk. Many of them are essential workers who work long shifts in the immediate vicinity of other people, at sites ranging from manufacturing facilities to warehouses and construction sites.
One company that tries to help minimize, or at least lower the risk of workers contracting the virus is StrongArm Technologies, maker of the FUSE wearable sensors (monitoring devices) that use machine learning to capture and analyze the risk of musculoskeletal injuries. The company recently announced that it is launching social distancing and COVID-19 contact tracing capabilities built inside the sensor.
“What we found is that the biggest fear for our clients is the incubation period of the disease. Having someone walking around for two weeks without showing any symptoms is a terrifying reality,” Sean Petterson, founder and CEO of StrongArm, says. “We can understand, down to the millisecond, every single person that may have come in contact with said potential infecting individual which allows us to trace back to patient zero.”
The physical distancing capability included in the sensor provides real-time feedback when the proximity threshold of 6 feet or less is detected to allow for distance correction. Alerts start with flashing LEDs and vibrational feedback, and escalate with auditory alerts if proximity is not corrected.
The other capability are the proximity interactions which are time-stamped and logged on the sensors, which can identify non-compliant individuals and individuals potentially at risk. Additionally, it offers historical contact tracing data in the event of a confirmed case or infection.
Risk prevention
For the current clients that use FUSE sensors, the COVID-19 options are simply an update that comes for free.
Prior to the coronavirus, the FUSE sensor (which weighs 0.25 lbs) was mostly used to track all the motions a user goes throughout the day and provide data on the movement and potential musculoskeletal injuries of the workers. These include real time alerts on noise, heat, or respiratory exposure, and in general, identifying when the end users are doing something risky (such as carrying too much weight or putting a lot pressure on their shoulders or spine), which could possibly lead to workplace injuries.
According to Peterson, who made the 2017 Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the Manufacturing and Industry section, blue-collar workers have been underserved in regard to equipment necessary for their jobs.
“Nike has a factory of designers building the next shoe for LeBron James to wear on the court for three hours, and there’s not a single level of that design intent for individuals that we like to call industrial athletes,” Petterson says.
Coming from a family where his father, who owned a construction company, died at the workplace, Petterson has always been interested in working with blue-collar workers safety. After graduating with an industrial design degree from Rochester Institute of Technology, he launched the company in June 2013, and today employs 35 people. The Brooklyn-based StrongArm has 25,000 people on the platform (is on target for 40,000 by the end of the year), and has seen a 600% growth in revenue since last year.
For Petterson, the company’s mission is to protect the workers, as well as the companies, because these are the types of jobs that are the backbone of the country’s economy.
“People understand that there is an evolution industry 4.0 and there is a reality that the system is starting to really hum, but you’ve left the most essential part, the human, out of the equation,” Petterson says.
Proximity Sensing
