New App Quickly Determines Injury Potential of Work Tasks, Allowing Employers to Redesign Jobs to Improve Safety
Liberty Mutual Insurance’s new ErgoValuator™ app helps policyholders more effectively protect their workers and bottom lines from overexertion injuries, which cost employers more than $14 billion annually.
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Overexertion injuries threaten every company and can happen when workers handle materials or equipment.
With the app, Liberty Mutual’s Risk Control consultants record a video of an employee performing a task, answer a few questions about the job, and within minutes can understand the likelihood of the task injuring the worker. Videos can also be sent from employers to Liberty Mutual consultants for quick analysis.
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“Reducing injuries require employers systematically identify risks, evaluate options and implement best practices, which can be time consuming,” said Liberty Mutual Vice President and General Manager of Risk Control James Merendino. “We drew on our long tradition of leveraging technology to improve safety – which dates back to the 1980’s – to develop an app that relies on sophisticated artificial intelligence to dramatically speed that process.”
By superimposing a wireframe skeleton over the image of the worker, the app shows how the current task stresses that individual. The app then reports the percentage of the population that can safely perform the task as currently designed. Employers can then adjust the task, quickly evaluate the new process, and confirm it can be safely performed by more employees.
To build the app, Liberty Mutual partnered with Kinetica Labs, a pioneer in the application of computer vision and artificial intelligence for occupational safety. The ErgoValuator app blends the insurer’s decades of safety research with Kinetica’s sophisticated object recognition and machine learning software. The result is a powerful but simple to use tool that enables employers to address the biggest single source of workplace injury and costs.
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