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Slips, trips, and falls at worksites and offices may add humor to Hollywood storylines, but they’re no laughing matter for safety officers and operations leaders in the real world.
At last count, 850 people died from job-related falls in a single year1 and more than 211,000 workers suffered injuries serious enough to force them out of work for at least a day.2
During the same period, falls cost US businesses over $16.5 billion,3 due in large part to workers’ compensation claims that soared to an average of more than $48,000 per incident.4
These numbers suggest many companies—particularly those in construction, utilities, mining, and other high-risk industries—need better safety equipment for employees.
In time, a recently patented invention called drone-enabled active fall protection may fill this need and help employers effectively rewrite the script on workplace parodies by reducing the fall-related accidents that take place on the job.
Improving worker safety
Historically, workplace fall prevention has consisted of employees tying themselves to various locations on or near structures where they were working, simply trusting that the equipment and anchor points were strong enough to support them if they fell.
Though functional, this approach is far from optimal. Mobility frequently proves limited, and safety largely relies on the worker’s ability to choose sturdy attachment sites and securely tether their gear to it.
In late 2019, four fellow engineers and I set out to create a safety solution that was superior to the manual hook-and-harness systems. Two years and numerous design iterations later, our idea for drone-enabled active fall protection has been patented. The invention uses unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and artificial intelligence (AI) to execute two core functions:
- Pre-analysis and preparation: During this stage, an operator dispatches a UAV equipped with active fall protection technology to a specific workspace, where it identifies the best anchor points for the worker’s safety equipment. If needed, the drone can also create anchor points and attach the user’s harness to locations that AI data determines are most secure and provide optimum mobility.
- Active protection: After the UAV attaches or confirms placement of the worker’s safety equipment, it continually monitors connections to ensure the user is secured to a minimum number of safe anchor points. Data generated by the technology will then instruct the drone to untether and retether the user’s safety equipment to new anchor points based on the person’s movement, positioning, or anticipated positioning.
By deploying drones and AI to not only inspect work areas for hazardous conditions but remedy many of the issues they find, employers can avoid a greater number of falls than with solutions that use similar technology in a passive manner.
Fall protection in action
To better understand how drone-enabled active fall protection works, consider the fictional yet representative story of Bob, a commercial contractor who frequently works on multi-story buildings with steeply pitched roofs:
- Bob’s company values worker safety, so supervisors purchased a high-end UAV equipped with the active fall tethering module to help ensure employees don’t slip and fall when repairing or replacing customers’ roofs.
- Before Bob or his coworkers begin a project, they send the drone to the top of the building to analyze the roof and create a layout of walkable and unwalkable areas and locate any three-dimensional objects in the workspace.
- With this data, the drone’s location processing engine identifies ideal anchor points around several concrete columns and other locations on the roof.
- Bob drills anchors into the proposed points (or has the drone do it), and then uses the UAV to validate the anchors are secure and installed with proper tether points.
- When Bob begins working on the roof, the drone attaches his safety equipment to the anchor points and continues to hover in the area, monitoring his equipment and ensuring he’s continuously fastened to two or more anchor points.
- As Bob moves to areas on the roof where he can’t reach an anchor point to attach his safety lines, the UAV fastens him to a workable tether point and unfastens him from the previous point, allowing Bob to remain fully tethered and able to move freely.
What’s more, if Bob slips while using drone-enabled active fall protection, the anchor points and his safety equipment will stop his fall. The drone will then alert Bob’s coworkers or site managers about the incident so rescue personnel can quickly respond.
Drone-enabled active fall protection may help employers rewrite the script on workplace parodies by reducing the fall-related accidents that take place on the job.
Envisioning future uses
Looking ahead, it isn’t difficult to envision drone-enabled active fall protection gaining widespread acceptance in the construction and utilities industries. The telecommunications sector also represents fertile ground for the invention.
Theoretically, the technology could one day be deployed in nursing homes or private residences to help decrease the number of falls among elderly individuals. Further out, it might even be used to reduce fall-related accidents among do-it-yourselfers who frequently put themselves in harm’s way when tinkering around the house.
Regardless of how, when, or by whom drone-enabled fall protection eventually comes to be used, the technology should make countless workplaces safer.
That extra protection may not inspire comedies in movies and television, but the peace of mind it can provide should draw huge smiles from employees whose well-being hangs in the balance whenever they go to work.
Todd Whitman is a principal IT architect at Kyndryl and has been granted more than 50 patents in a career that spans more than three decades in the technology industry.
1 Top Work-related Injury Causes, NSC Injury Facts, National Safety Council, 2021
2 Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses (SOII) and the Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (CFOI), U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2021
3 2021 Workplace Safety Index: the top 10 causes of disabling injuries, Liberty Mutual Insurance, 2021
4 Workers’ Compensation Costs, NSC Injury Facts, National Safety Council, 2021