AI vision offers new insights for heavy industry. Deciphering those insights is the next frontier.

Data. It’s everywhere. Hot on its heels is a growing business trend toward data-driven decision-making. After all, the promise of data is enticing. It’s the gateway to more informed decisions that can improve efficiency, reduce risks, and increase productivity. 

Yet, the pure act of amassing data is not the answer. It's what teams do with the data that matters.

This is where technology innovators and manufacturers have the chance to step in and step up. Our role is more than enabling the flow of data. It’s to make the constant stream of new information truly useful.

‍Heavy Industry and the data skills gap

Heavy industry is full of highly skilled workers but missing from some tool belts is the ability to process vast amounts of data. 

While the engagement of data-savvy professionals across the sector would help remedy this challenge, it would be a slow and inefficient process. The better solution? Close the gap with intuitive technology solutions that mobilise Health & Safety (H&S) teams toward what matters.

It’s time to move beyond the provision of data and help teams decipher it. At Presien, we believe there is little benefit in providing the ingredients without handing over the recipe for success. And with eight years of experience under our belt, we have a thing or two to share.

‍Drowning in data

Lead safety indicators are a relevant example to unpack this point. 

There’s a growing consensus across heavy industry that tracking near misses is essential. The more progressive H&S leaders are addressing these industrial close shaves by ensuring the associated data is automated via solutions like AI vision.

In doing so, these H&S professionals have opened the floodgates to valuable data. Lots of it. As an example, our flagship product Blindsight - a simple pre-trained AI vision system -  is currently capturing a staggering 7,000 plus near misses per week across our heavy industry customer base. 

In order to make data of this magnitude meaningful, we decided to make it tell a story.

‍Separating the signal from the noise 

Imagine for a moment you are a H&S lead at an open pit mining operation. As the information from Blindsight begins to stream to your laptop, you notice hundreds of near-misses across your sites in the space of one week. Suddenly the real dangers of your operation become even starker. 

Yet, not all risks are created equal. 

Presien’s new Blindsight Enterprise Reporting platform has the functionality to ‘triage’ incidents by providing identification of the highest-risk interactions via a ‘risk score’. This feature empowers managers to focus on the highest on-site priorities and work towards improved behaviour. 

As a construction management professional, Damien describes:

“We’re constantly trying to make sense of a huge amount of data from various systems and sources. Features like Blindsight’s risk score are site-changing as they bring issues that need obvious attention to the forefront. It’s like finding an insight in a data stack!” 

‍A risk score for success

Focusing on vehicle-person interaction, our new risk assessment feature flags alerts as low, mid and high risk. Here’s how it works:

Our AI model estimates three main metrics for each person detected in an alert:

• Distance (of the person from the camera)
• Attention (of the person towards the camera)
• Pose (of the person in the frame).

The metrics are tracked and combined to provide an overall risk score for each alert. Examples could include:

• High Risk: a person is looking away from the camera and the vehicle is moving towards them
• Mid Risk: a person is walking past the camera with their head turned away
• Low Risk: a person is facing the vehicle with their gaze towards the camera.
  

Customers can filter alerts using this risk score and see where the most critical alerts are happening. The key to making this truly actionable to teams is interoperability. That’s why we’re currently working hard to ensure the feature is integrated into a variety of customer workflows.

An eye on tomorrow 

In 2023, the focus is on technology makers and manufacturers to make data more actionable. 

Complex environments like heavy industry require solutions that are simple and seamless. Sometimes it’s the simplest of features that do the true heavy lifting. 

At Presien, we’re always looking for partners to help make the data puzzle a complete picture.