Seeing is Believing: How Machine Vision Protects Workers

Seeing is Believing: How Machine Vision Protects Workers
Photo by Zac Edmonds / Unsplash

In 1994 one of my coworkers was crushed to death on a construction site.

His young wife and family were devasted.

The equipment operator suffered a mental breakdown. He was never the same after the accident.

But here's how construction tech prevents accidents like that from ever happening again.

Just another day on the job

The construction site is busy, noisy, and full of potential hazards.

But that's normal.

We get used to navigating the mud, machines, material stockpiles, and trucks entering and exiting the site.

My co-worker was a new hire.

Just a rookie learning the ropes and finding his way around the job site.

My coworker rounded a blind corner and walked right into an aerial lift machine carrying a load of block.

Neither my coworker nor the machine operator saw each other or had time to react.

A tragic accident.

The future of construction safety is looking up –and looking around


Today, job sites are equipped with 360° cameras and safety monitoring systems that use machine vision, AI, and person detection technology.

When combined, these tech tools identify high-risk areas and hazardous situations before they turn tragic.

And that's not all.

Heavy equipment manufacturers outfit their machines with collision avoidance systems like cameras and radar technologies.

Safety systems like this eliminate blind spots and warn the operator of potential collision hazards.

-And for existing equipment...

Safety-focused tech companies like Rombit provide after-market proximity detection systems.

Pedestrians wear simple UWB-based devices the size of a smartwatch.

And machines have full 360° early warning systems, alerting both the operator and pedestrian of imminent danger.

Construction sites using systems like these reduce safety incidents by over 40%

But we're just getting started.


It won't be long until tragic construction accidents are a thing of the past.

And risk detection and collision avoidance technologies are leading the way.


#safety#riskdetection#machinevision#AI#persondetection#collisionavoidance#proximitydetection, #radar#UWB