A walk through the Safety 2016 expo floor on Sunday afternoon revealed a stronger emphasis than ever on safety data collection and analysis. The age of "going mobile" has come to professional safety. The idea is to make safety inspections, audits, job safety analyses and job observations faster, smarter, and easier to do. One vendor promises pros that its cloud-based software will mean the end of hand-written forms and reports.

Capturing audit observations and descriptions on the spot and creating data bases of hundreds or thousands of observations and audit findings can then be analyzed using predictive calculations to identify injury precursor events and conditions before accidents happen.