Page 64 - OHS, October 2023

WEARABLE TECHNOLOGY Revolutionizing Safety: A Move Towards Personalized Protection Moving past benchmarks to real-time individualized insights, technology is paving the way for workplaces that drive individualized safety for each worker. BY MATTHEW HART According to the Department of Commerce, women make up around 30 percent of manufacturing jobs today.1 While that representation is disproportionately low compared to the 47 percent of women in the overall workforce, it’s still a stark increase from the not too distant past when these jobs were overwhelmingly held by men. Optimistically, women’s participation in industrial sectors is also expected to continue increasing as automation makes physically intense job functions more accessible. But while more women are clocking in today, we must recog- nize and address the ways the past is still lingering in the veins of the industry and restricting progress. Occupational safety is an area where outdated data is inform- ing far too many trainings and safety processes being implement- ed today. I still walk into warehouses and manufacturing facilities only to see benchmarks like “this weight is suitable for 75 percent of males” being used to inform all workers on what is safe to lift. If you’re a woman, or a man who doesn’t fit into the average 75 percent bucket, you’re out of luck. Data that’s exclusive in nature is also integrated deeper into our industry’s safety fabric. Longstanding training methodolo- gies and best practices are a result of decades of injury data from when these sectors were nearly exclusively male. Gender and sex aside, they also assume factors like height, weight, strength, fa- tigue, stress level and injury status. Put simply, they recommend the best practice for the most “typical” human, which isn’t very helpful on an individual basis. When considering the effects of this at scale, the need to ad- dress the issue becomes even more apparent. Compared to men, women are more likely to develop at least one musculoskeletal disorder while performing job-related duties. As improving re- tention and reducing injuries remains so key to productivity and efficiency, we as an industry cannot afford to overlook equal safe- ty attention for every worker. An Industry Shift Towards Customized Safety The workforce safety sector has seen significant innovation in the past decade, finding new applications for AI and advanced sensor technology to solve the greatest safety challenge: offering more personalized insights to individual workers and moving away from the “typical” human approach. We continue to see that ev- ery body has its unique tendencies, strengths and vulnerabilities and that nothing reduces injury rates as effectively as diagnosing and addressing risk on an individual basis. Recently, my company carried out a comprehensive study to put the “typical” human safety approach to bed once and for 64 Occupational Health & Safety | OCTOBER 2023 www.ohsonline.com