UK HSE to launch regulatory sandbox for industrial safety tech

The UK’s Health and Safety Executive (HSE) is inviting know-how firms to take part in an Industrial Safetytech Regulatory Sandbox as a part of its Discovering Safety initiative, which was arrange to discover how higher tech and regulation can enhance safety and danger administration in industrial workplaces.

Delivered in partnership with the Safetytech Accelerator, a non-profit established by Lloyd’s Register and the Lloyd’s Register Foundation to promote wider adoption of safety-related applied sciences, Discovering Safety particularly seems to discover new methods of utilizing knowledge and analytics to forestall office accidents.

The sandbox being launched will focus initially on innovation round vital areas of danger in development – together with falls from peak, car collisions, crane operations and guide dealing with – and is about to start in April 2023.  

Regulatory sandboxes, resembling these being developed by the UK’s info commissioner, are check environments that enable software program to be trialled in real-life conditions beneath the shut supervision of regulators or different oversight our bodies.

HSE has mentioned the sandbox may even discover methods to assess danger and guarantee more practical regulatory compliance; assist speed up the adoption of confirmed safety tech merchandise; and work to perceive and cut back boundaries which may delay the deployment of recent safety applied sciences.

It may even undertake a collaborative “tripartite approach” between trade, the tech sector and HSE as a regulator to establish widespread safety issues and devise options.

The undertaking is being financed by a £555,000 grant from the Regulators’ Pioneer Fund, which was arrange in July 2022 to assist UK regulators experiment with new approaches. “We are committed to supporting health and safety innovation, and also to exploring ways that we can be innovative in how we approach regulation,” mentioned Helen Balmforth, head of knowledge analytics at HSE and lead for the Discovering Safety undertaking. “We are looking to the safetytech community to help identify the best opportunities for progress and how we can collectively overcome the barriers that limit progress.”

The sandbox will recruit six know-how firms with “high-potential” safetytech merchandise by the top of February 2023. Each of those companies will obtain up to £15,000 in funding to assist their involvement within the sandbox, which is open to UK-based firms with “market-ready or pilot-ready” applied sciences.

Speaking to Computer Weekly, Balmforth mentioned the Discovering Safety initiative happened as a result of HSE “knew we could do more” with the dear well being and safety info at its disposal, particularly given the brand new analytical instruments and strategies that at the moment are out there to assist extract insights from this knowledge.

She added that working with the Safetytech Accelerator on the programme has additionally “opened up our ability” to work instantly with startups, including that it has helped HSE to undertake new methods of “working at pace” and push the boundaries of the way it seeks to apply new applied sciences.

Steven Naylor, a senior scientist in HSE’s science division, added that whereas the regulator already has its personal in-house knowledge science and analytics capabilities, it recognises that the UK’s startup ecosystem presents a better number of capabilities that may complement HSE’s.

“We also recognise that, particularly construction projects, generate huge amounts of data,” he mentioned. “We’re really interested in technologies that allow effective use of AI [artificial intelligence] and machine learning, predictive analytics to take data and predict outcomes, technologies around dynamic risk assessment … [and] technologies that can potentially nudge workers into safer behaviours.”

Naylor added that whereas most well being and safety info is at present captured in “narrative form” by way of free-text experiences, applied sciences resembling wearables, sensors and different industrial web of issues (IoT) gadgets may help to generate and make use of knowledge in actual time.

“A big part of the challenge is breaking down those data silos,” he mentioned. “The typical data sets that health and safety functions are working with are accident reports and near-miss reports. A lot of that information is very reactive in nature – something needs to happen or be reported for us to be collecting information on it – but we are increasingly trying to be more proactive.”

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