UK technology companies with game-changing safetytech products are being invited to help Discovering Safety, a programme of work delivered by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), Britain’s health and safety regulator, explore how better innovation and regulation can improve safety and risk management in industrial workplaces.
Discovering Safety is working in partnership with Safetytech Accelerator, a non-profit organisation dedicated to advancing safetytech in industry, to launch the Industrial Safetytech Regulatory Sandbox, the world’s first regulatory sandbox for industrial safetytech. Together, they are currently working to identify an initial cohort of technology companies to join the initiative.
The sandbox will bring together the regulator, safetytech innovators and major UK industrial companies to explore significant opportunities to improve workplace health and safety.
It has three main aims:
- Explore ways to undertake assessment and compliance activities more effectively
- Help accelerate the adoption of proven safetytech products in industry
- Understand and reduce barriers that might delay the development of new life-saving technologies.
Six technology companies with high-potential safetytech products will be recruited to the sandbox by the end of February 2023. It will focus initially on innovation around significant areas of risk in construction, including falls from height, vehicle collisions, crane operations and manual handling.
Dr Helen Balmforth, Head of Data Analytics at Health and Safety Executive and lead on Discovering Safety, comments: “We are committed to supporting health and safety innovation, and also to exploring ways that we can be innovative in how we approach regulation. We are looking to the safetytech community to help identify the best opportunities for progress and how we can collectively overcome the barriers that limit progress.”
Dr Maurizio Pilu, Managing Director at Safetytech Accelerator, comments: “Thanks to advances in areas such as AI, analytics, augmented reality, wearables, drones and robotics, there is now huge potential to make industry safer. This groundbreaking sandbox presents safetytech companies of all sizes with an opportunity to understand and help shape the regulatory landscape to accelerate life-saving innovation for all.”
The Industrial Safetytech Regulatory Sandbox is open to UK-based companies with market-ready or pilot-ready technology products that could improve safety and risk management in construction. Companies are invited to submit information about their safetytech products to the Safetytech Accelerator to be considered for the sandbox.
