Accelerating life-saving safety solutions.

The award-winning Safetytech Accelerator, an exciting joint venture from Lloyd’s Register and Lloyd’s Register Foundation, is bringing big business together with digital startups to make safety improvements happen faster. The programme has been working with leading global innovation platform Plug and Play Tech Centre, tapping in to their extensive pool of innovative startups, finding the best brains of the digital industry to tackle some of industry’s most pressing safety challenges and come up with life-saving solutions.

In recent years, the rate of safety incidents globally has plateaued. According to new research from Lloyd’s Register Foundation – the Safetytech Report – 2.8 million people die each year from safety incidents in the workplace, or exposure to hazardous materials or situations. These incidents result in the loss of about 3.9 % of the world’s GDP2.

By accelerating digital technology in industries like Marine, Energy and Supply Chain, the Safety Accelerator is encouraging the growth of the safetytech industry and is addressing both the human and financial impact of poor safety. Safetytech – the technologies, products and services that are disrupting safety approaches in traditional, safety-critical industries and infrastructure – is forecast to expand rapidly in the short term, led by start-ups and innovative players.

To date, the Safetytech Accelerator has initiated 25 safetytech Innovation Challenges between industry leaders and global startups, in the marine energy and food sectors. Winning startups go on to receive funding to test their tech in live industry environments for three months, alongside leading companies.

The programme has engaged with over 600 global startups across 18 countries in just two years, with over 20 companies partnering with the programme to date, including Wallenius Wilhelmsen, DP World, Shell, and Phillips66.

The UK’s Health and Safety Executive (HSE) have also partnered with the Accelerator, in a project to reduce accidents by automatically desensitising and anonymising over 1.5 million health and safety documents, working with startup Ohalo.

The need to anonymise data has been a major obstacle to the creation of the large datasets that are needed to provide HSE with the insights that lead to safety improvements. This project saw 1.5 million records anonymised (with 99% accuracy). Ohalo’s digital solution meant this was achieved in 1.4 days compared to 12.5 years. The trial proved very impactful, in fact, Ohalo and HSE have since gone on to sign a two-year commercial contract to continue their successful collaboration.

Kyle DuPont, Ohalo’s CEO, explained how the Safety Accelerator helped:

“The Safety Accelerator was the perfect vehicle for the HSE and Ohalo teams to work together, in iteratively improving the algorithms to get to a point where HSE would be comfortable with sharing the data. From the beginning, Lloyd’s Register was able to assist us in managing the project and providing feedback from their experience with other clients. The great work between the three parties resulted in the great outcome we achieved, which is going into production in the near future, hopefully changing the lives of many workers for the better.”

Marine and offshore jobs can be some of the most stressful in the world. Pacific International Lines (PIL) partnered with the Safety Accelerator and chose Texan startup Senseye and their solution, which could assess crew’s psychological and emotional health before starting an important task or scheduled watch. The Senseye solution scans crew’s eyes and uses high-resolution video footage to check for any psychological factors that might impair them from operating the ship safely.

ChuXing Peng, Asst GM, QSSD, Fleet Division, Pacific International Lines spoke of his excitement about being involved with the programme:

“This has been an exciting journey for us in the management office ashore and for our floating colleagues on board, we truly appreciate the amazing technologies Senseye had developed, and in given time, will be perfected to address the pain point of the industry.”

The programme is excited to be currently partnered with PepsiCo, trialling a startup solution to revolutionise listeria detection in food. To prevent listeria from entering the food chain, processors test their production sites frequently using swab tests. However, this may not generate results for several hours, or days. Rapid detection for allergens and pathogens using state of the art new technologies can be key to enabling safety at each step of the food supply chain. The winning startup, SnapDNA, is working with PepsiCo for three months and will deploy its innovative safetytech solution – a speedy 20-minute, sample-to-answer results for Listeria, Salmonella, and E. coli.

The Safetytech Accelerator has proudly won both the Global and European Award for Excellence in Data and Technology Innovation at the prestigious Lloyd’s List Europe Awards, but it’s only just the beginning. The programme is beginning to make a real impact in industry and it is hoped that it will be used as a basis for encouraging the safetytech community to accelerate growth in safety innovation, in the same way ‘FinTech’ accelerated growth in the world of finance. In fact, the combined global industry market potential for safetytech by 2023 is $863 billion, so watch this space.

This article first published on Lloyd’s Register Foundation website.