Overview

pFogHorn is a developer of edge AI software for the industrial and commercial IoT space. Through advanced analytics and machine learning, FogHorn’s software platform enhances the on-premises edge environment to enable new classes of applications for advanced monitoring and diagnostics, machine performance optimization, proactive maintenance and operational intelligence use cases. FogHorn’s technology is ideally suited for OEMs, systems integrators and end customers in manufacturing, power and water, oil and gas, renewable energy, mining, transportation, healthcare and retail, as well as smart grid, smart city, smart building and connected vehicle applications.  /p

Supernova Award Category

Future of Work: Employee Experience

The Problem

pAs businesses across the globe are returning to work amid the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations across industries are challenged to meet significantly elevated health and safety requirements for employees and customers, including expanded use of personal protective equipment (PPE), on-going social distancing mandates, and daily temperature screenings. Auditing the use of health and safety processes has traditionally been a manual task - not only increasing the potential for monitoring errors but also requiring costly labor resources. In fact, businesses pay almost $1 billion per week in direct workers' compensation costs (pre-COVID), enabled in part by ineffective monitoring systems -- which doesn’t include indirect costs, such as lost productivity, implementation of corrective measures or training replacement employees. What’s more, the stakes will be even higher moving forward in a post-COVID world, as both consumers and organizations are hyper-aware of the potential outcomes if these new requirements aren’t met. /p

The Solution

pThe COVID-19 pandemic shed light on the concern of worker health and need for automation of health and safety monitoring. FogHorn launched its new Lightning Health Safety Solution suite to improve the safety of workplaces and help mitigate the spread of contagious illnesses, as businesses and institutions across the globe return to work in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Lightning Health Safety Solution suite helps organizations proactively monitor workforce health and safety via video and other sensors using real-time streaming analytics and machine learning at the edge. Use cases include efficiently measuring workers’ temperatures; monitoring coughs, appropriate hand washing and social distancing; and tracking the use of PPE to mitigating the impact of future outbreaks of sickness in the workplace. The solution also goes beyond health concerns and monitors for threats to worker safety, such as spill hazards, cranes and falling debris./p

The results

pThe Lightning Health Safety Solution leverages real-time AI capabilities to enable organizations to collect and process live RGB and thermal camera streams, allowing them to identify issues in real-time and publish SMS or email alerts of any compliance violations immediately. Pairing AI with real-time analytics allows for the efficient tracking and flagging of health and safety processes, ultimately mitigating the impact of future outbreaks in the workplace. Businesses, such as distribution centers, food processing, educational and government institutions, are tasked with ensuring staff and visitors are following appropriate guidelines, like wearing masks, social distancing and washing their hands properly. To date, monitoring has not been available or is conducted by supervisors or staff observing adherence to practices and through posted reminders. To scale these practices, organizations can use IoT sensor data to alert them if someone is not in compliance or serve as a reminder to reinforce best practices. For industrial organizations, ensuring safety also includes ensuring use of protective gear, such as safety goggles, reflective vests, hard hats and more. The Lightning Health Safety Solution can also be customized to detect potential environmental safety hazards, such as falling objects and trip hazards. By automating the monitoring process, organizations can scale detection of PPE for long term increases in worker safety and compliance./p

Metrics

pBefore deploying the Lightning Health Safety Solution, organizations were not equipped with the capabilities to test and monitor the workplace for threats such as illnesses, falling debris or lack of PPE usage. These capabilities have become critical to enforcing workplace safety policies, as businesses return to work amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. After deploying Lightning Health safety, organizations are now able to do efficiently and effectively monitor for these potential threats to worker and health safety en masse. By proactively monitoring worker temperatures, coughs and social distancing, organizations can mitigate the impact of future outbreaks of any sickness, including COVID-19, in the workplace. Additionally, organizations can protect the monitored employee data with FogHorn’s streaming analytics at the edge, as all images, videos and other data are processed in real-time, by not transmitting the data off-site or to the cloud. /p

The Technology

pThe Lightning Health Safety Solution leverages streaming video analytics and sensor fusion to automate monitoring. In turn, it derives real-time insights to generate alerts when policy violations occur, or unsafe conditions are detected. Audio/video streams and thermal cameras are used to collect and send data to the Lightning solutions, which uses FogHorn’s VEL Complex Event Processing and EdgeML algorithms to process the real-time streaming data/p

Disruptive Factor

pThe COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed how organizations view and deal with health and safety. In the current environment, health and safety auditing has become pivotal for every organization to ensure the well-being of its workforce. This unprecedented scale of ubiquitous monitoring is becoming and will become the new normal but will only be achieved via an automated and fool-proof solution. FogHorn’s Lightning Health Safety Solution uses real-time edge analytics to solve this exact conundrum for organizations. The solution’s AI capabilities transform live streams from video cameras or other sensor-filled endpoints into highly automated real-time alerts and actionable insights. The solution seamlessly automates the entire process for health, safety and hazard detection, ensuring the well-being of workforces and consumers. /p p /p pIn addition to industrial environments such as manufacturing, warehousing and supply chain organizations, the Lightning Health Safety Solution can be beneficial to workers across non-industrial environments. These include hospitality, commercial real estate, healthcare, government, education, and retail organizations. /p

Shining Moment

pFogHorn Lightning™ solutions are preconfigured solutions with use-case specific machine learning models, notification capabilities and visualization dashboards. Lightning solutions allows organizations to rapidly deploy edge AI and immediately derive insights to common problems. Solutions can be set up in as little as a few hours and can be used individually or combined solutions to create a tailored system over time. /p