We credit industrial automation with productivity, efficiency, and safety gains, citing manual handling reduction and a reduction in musculoskeletal injury as a first-stage safety benefit. Yet, advanced technologies bring new opportunities for improved worker safety beyond manual handling, requiring an adaptation in our safety thinking.
The evolution in technology and safety provides an ever-greater ability to remove workers from dangerous workplaces, provide advanced safety monitoring and enforcement, and use automation in safe design. These advances are on the back of the rise in the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and computer vision (CV).