Scott Coleman, CEO of Preventure
April 4, 2022
In this episode, Sheldon speaks with Scott Coleman the Founder and CEO of Preventure the wearable technology that will prevent workplace injuries using Sports Science technology. Preventure.live enables
Safety professionals to reduce workplace injury risk in a measurable way, using wearable technology, video analysis and valid, reliable data.
Workers to reduce their own injury risk using wearable technology to measure movements, receive alerts when they move in an unsafe or inefficient way and set challenges/earn rewards.
Keywords: Sheldon Primus, Scott Coleman, US Government, Australian Government, University of Technology Sydney, University of Canberra, Sports Medicine, Overexertion, Physical Therapy, Safety Culture, OSHA Compliance, Ergonomics, Back Safety, EHS, Safety and Health
[00:00:02] spk_0: this episode is powered by safety FM.
[00:00:16] spk_1: Welcome to the safety consultant podcast. I'm your host, Sheldon promised this is the podcast where I teach you the business of being a safety consultant and in today's episode, we're going to learn a little bit about wearable safety technology as we talked to the Ceo and owner of prevention that is scott Coleman scott. Coleman was in the sports medicine field for two decades and actually over two decades and he was witnessing his mom as she was handling patients and she had received some injuries herself and some pain and doing that and he decided that there's a better way. So he used his understanding from sports medicine, we got a grant from the Australian government, worked with the University of Technology, Sydney and the University of Canterbury to develop test and validate the product and it's being used throughout many different countries to just help workers with their manual handling and how they're doing that and to create some sort of system to prevent injuries due to those activities. So in this episode we just get to know scott a little in his journey to creating the product, but then also his feeling about the safety industry and how we did this one was through a livestream. So I got back on, did a livestream, I'm going to try to do those more. So you'll see a calendar of live streaming coming up real soon. The best way for you to get that will be through, subscribing to this podcast so you can get all the information that you need. And also you can look me up on linkedin which is linkedin dot com forward slash in forward slash Sheldon Primus, you can see all the live streams on there, you can go to Youtube and look for safety consultant us and then you'll be able to get those streams there as well. Or you can join the facebook group, so you go to facebook dot com forward slash groups with an s forward slash safety consultant. So those are the ways you could see the live stream. I'm going to post a calendar of when I'll be doing those live streams but this one was a fun one with scott and we're able to really go dig deep into why he thought this was a way to help some people who were into safety field and just regular workers and just the benefits to using prevention will not be any extra stuff at the end of this episode. So, enjoy your week and truly get them. Alright, well, welcome welcome Mr Scott Coleman, my very first guest on this. See I surprised that one on you didn't I?
[00:03:18] spk_2: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I've been looking forward to this. So yeah, that's really exciting.
[00:03:24] spk_1: You know, it's been wonderful and facebook user, I do miss you too. Can you see any of the chats there scott?
[00:03:33] spk_2: Yeah, I can I can I did see that had like a Matrix, I thought I didn't get into the whole Matrix movie thing. I know people move in slow motion and things are pixelated. So I get
[00:03:43] spk_1: it. That's great. Well, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show and being part of it and um this is gonna be broadcast and rebroadcast over for those of you on the podcast there listening to this. This first came out on a livestream. So you're gonna have to get on my linkedin, my facebook groups uh and the youtube in order to get the live streaming in and that's all safety consultant is the branding if you will. So prevention before we talk about the preventer itself. Well, first tell me, um give us a hint of, of what got you into safety and health and I know it's going to lead into preventer as well. Uh so let's let's do a little bit of both. So a little bit of your background if you don't mind sir, and then also just tell us how, tell us what you got.
[00:04:36] spk_2: Yeah, of course. So, um my background of a sports physical therapist. So I I grew up doing a lot of sports getting injured, a lot fell in love with the sports physical therapy profession, went through college and studied it and then I took a break to focus more on injury prevention because the sports that I was treating the most were repetitive loading sports. So this is like more of your olympic sports. So rowing and track and field and swimming. And I found that in Australia in particular? So I'm sure you've all picked up my accent. I am Australian and in Australia we don't have the depth of talent that other countries have when it comes to olympic sports. So when we do have someone that's world class, we need to protect them. And so the Australian system involved using whatever systems possible to protect to identify injury risks early to prevent them happening. And these were like I said, repetitive loading sports. So it came about that my career ventured down this movement analysis path and the best way to analyze movements is through wearable technology. So I took a few years away from the physical therapy profession to become a bio bio mechanistic, focusing on wearable technology and movement analysis and, and you know, this was in the mid nineties. So I'm sorry in the mid nineties, the mid noughties. So leading up to the 2000 and eight, Beijing olympics was when I was really heavily involved in movement analysis for injury prevention and around that time my mother was working as a nurse, she was sort of heading towards the end of her career for the last decade of her career. And as we all know, nurses put the care of their patients before the care of themselves. She moved in a way to a patient had fallen. She moved in a way to help the patient and hurt her back and ended up having seven levels of her spine fused. And so at the time I thought, well, why were you moving the way you were moving? Was there a way that you could have identified the risk that you were under? And she had developed bad habits as a lot of these workers, especially health care workers, but workers in all physically demanding occupations, we all know they developed bad habits, whether it be shortcuts or whatever it is or whether it be movement patterns that they've developed to compensate for a previous injury. My mother had had a previous back injury and so she was moving in ways to compensate for that. Never had it had it had it addressed and as a result her injury led to an early career retirement and ongoing pain and suffering that's continuing today. So, while I was making a big difference, doing movement analysis in do prevention for these elite athletes, I realized the same process could easily be used to make an impact to the lives of millions of physical workers globally. So I started scratching the surface, asking my mom, you know, what was the injury prevention program like in the hospital that you worked? Eventually she had a safe lifting manual provided to her when she started 5 to 10 years prior and that was it. And that's safe lifting manual sat on the shelf in the head office and that that was it. And that's part of the reason why she ended up with an injury because there was no ongoing checkpoints to see whether her movement patterns were correct. There was no ongoing training. There was no refreshers. There was nothing. So I started thinking, all right, well, how can we translate or transfer a lot of the technology and the processes used to protect the world's best athletes across to the workplace. And that's that's what we did. So, I got support from the Australian government through a grant and we started and we got some partners who helped us test what we were doing. I work for a on one of the world's biggest insurance brokers in their people risk team two years to understand the needs of all the stakeholders being the workers most importantly, but the employers, the insurers, the brokers, the safety professionals as well. And we wanted to make sure that we built something that could be used by all stakeholders, not just build something to address the needs of the employer and neglect the worker or build something that reduced claims cost for the insurer, but neglected everyone else. We wanted to make sure that every stakeholder in this whole process is going to benefit from whatever we build. And now, and we're still on that journey. We've still got partners who are safety professionals. So we've built a tool for their tool belt that they can use to complement the services that they provide to provide evidence that what they're doing is actually making a difference. Because when you can measure it and say, here's what it was before we started here is what it is now after we've done the consulting services. But of course, you know, we want to make sure that the workers are alerted to when they are at an injury, an increased risk of an injury and then do something about it. And I suppose that's the long version of my journey to this point. And I think my journey is our journey. We've got a team.
[00:09:54] spk_1: Yeah. You got a good team though. You got, you know, even though you say it's your journey. Yes, I know it's anybody with the team. When you're saying you as the owner, you always mean the team too and you've got a wonderful team that's helping you out. Um, a lot of things struck me in that, um, in in your description and um, most of the time when people think about the movement part, especially when, you know, people are video gamers or something and they're thinking that you put all these sensors on somebody and then they get their signature move in the game because of those sensors and movements. So that's the first thing I thought about and I was like, hold on, this might be that same type of technology. Am I correct?
[00:10:36] spk_2: Well, yeah. And this was a journey, we're embarking on 8, 10 years ago where I started in sports, you measure everything because you really want to find that small area. First of all a performance improvement. But second of all you want to make sure that you do don't miss anything. So you measure everything and use all that data analysis to identify the injury risk. And I started doing that in the workplace and it was overwhelming and even now there's still wearable products available in the workplace that are still down that path of it's too much. And even the concept of paralysis by analysis you can actually go down such a rabbit hole with the data analysis that you lose the bigger picture. And so it took a lot of refinement to get to the point where, yeah, now we basically use one sensor that goes on the upper back that measures the trunk movement because we know it's the back injuries that have the biggest impact that the biggest cost, but also if there's a back injury, that's the biggest predictor of future injury as well. But also, you know, you've got a sensor on the back, it doesn't measure arm. So the other sensor just goes on the upper arm of one of the arms, usually the work and knows which arm does the most physical loads. So they put the sensor on that arm and that's it. We we originally had sensors on the legs but I realized that the sensor on the back could actually pick up most of the G forces or the impacts through the legs. So we didn't really need to to have sensors on the legs we do for special projects because I'm a science nerd. So if someone
[00:12:11] spk_1: says, look, we really
[00:12:12] spk_2: like to see more information on the knee load or the ankle angles, it's like Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's put more sensors on and let's do a special project. But the core product we have only has the two senses because we want it to be cost effective and user friendly for everyone to use. So we narrowed it down to just the two and they give us more than enough information to identify the movement patterns for different workers doing different
[00:12:37] spk_1: tasks. I'm imagining that some of the safety and health professionals that get your your information in and your your equipment And I'm sure as they're trying stuff out, they're looking at a lagging indicator, meaning the the activity has happened, but it seems like it's also a leading indicator because now you're seeing if there's a I don't know, I don't know if I'm reading into this technology, let me know, but but I've been a safety and health coordinator. I get into safety in '94. So it's been a while, but if you now see a worker who was starting to behave erratically or their movement is different. Now, can you prove possible impairment? Can you prove that maybe their minds not on the job today. Can you uh what has that been used for evil? That's all I'm trying to say because the safety and health and that's one of the things that that may happen with technology like that.
[00:13:41] spk_2: Yeah. 100%. And again, when I started this journey, I spent a lot of time with workers to the point where I would literally be walking around behind these warehouse workers with a laptop and they've got the senses and I had to be within 10 m. So I'd be running around while they're on forklifts trying to stay within 10 m. But when I spent a full shift with the mama asking them, what do you want out of this? What are you concerned about? What, how can you see this technology being used? And the biggest concern would be the biggest concern was first of all, they didn't want to be tracked. They didn't want someone in the in the office on a laptop being able to see exactly where they are and what they're doing every minute of the day. So that was the first thing we made sure we addressed no tracking and the communication behind the technology is the sensors measure the load, which is the physical demands of what they're doing. And so when you communicate it in that way you say to a worker, we know what you do is physical, We want to measure it because when we measure it, we can manage it and we can identify ways of reducing it. We don't want to track where you're going. We don't want to see how hard you're working. Because that was another thing early on. I had, again because I'm a science and I wanted to measure there's two types of load. There's external load which is the way they move, which is the biomechanics, which is what we focus on. But then there's internal load which is the way the body responds to the external load. So you can have two individuals moving in exactly the same way I would say it's two runners. For example two people running with a very very similar running pattern. They're not necessarily going to have the same heart rate because the internal load to run that way for one individual is different to another. So I thought, oh imagine if we could measure the internal load of all these workers you could work out who's moving more efficiently because their heart rates lower and but that workers are going no no, no, no I'm not interested in heart rate because that's a measure of exertion. And the boss could say you're not working hard enough because your heart rate is not as high as everyone else's. So you're slacking off. So we're straight away said no heart rate. No. Gps tracking. We wanted to measure the external load which is basically the way they move to exert a force because physical work is about exerting a force whether pushing or pulling objects, lifting, carrying whatever it is, it's about exerting the force and early on it was like, wow, I wanted to measure the force and we did, but then I realized that the force for a task is the same for all workers. So going back to the amazon example that you said before in those amazon warehouses, the force to move packages around that warehouse is the same for every individual, but every individual will exert that force differently by moving differently. You're going to have taller workers moving different to shorter, different gender, different injury history. Someone with a knee injury history is going to move differently to someone without a knee injury
[00:16:47] spk_1: history. That's what
[00:16:48] spk_2: we focus on. You measure the way the workers exert the force. Then going back to your lead or lag indicators, you can say all right, the lead indicators, we know workers moving in this particular way have a higher risk of overload. Let's address it before it becomes an injury before they get overloaded. And then the last bit of technical talk I'll go through is I've talked about internal external load. When you look at external load, there's two components and this concept has evolved through elite sport where all athletes no matter what the sport is that you'll see there's a lump in the back of their jersey, whether it be ice hockey, basketball, baseball, you name it, they're being monitored for load and the load is classified as acute load, which is for example the intensity or measuring the physical demands of a training session or a competition. So the acute load for a basketball game for our group of athletes is X. So there's a number for that and they can say, all right, well who's above, who's below that load number. If they're above the load number, we need to manage them differently than if they're below the load number. So that's the acute load and we can do that in the workplace. So a task is considered acute load where you measure the demands of a particular task and that's great. But then you want to look at how that looks over a shift and that's chronic load. So with an athlete, the chronic load would be the training cycle. All these athletes go through training cycles, so they go through peaks and recovery periods and that's the chronic load, which is made up from all of these acute
[00:18:32] spk_1: loads. So
[00:18:33] spk_2: we did the same in the workplace. We measured the demands throughout a full shift and that's the chronic load and then you get that balance like which workers are coping with the acute load and which ones are not, there's the lead indicator, let's do something with these workers who are not coping with the acute load. So the workers who are doing tasks in ways like my mother who had a bad habit, she was moving patients in a way she shouldn't have. So her acute load was not good, but her chronic load was also not good because she would fatigue quickly because she was getting older. And we know with aging workers they're less able to tolerate the chronic load, they will fatigue quicker. So when you measure it, you can see who the outliers are and say, alright, well here are the workers who are not coping with the chronic load. First of all, can we change what they're doing in a shift? Can we schedule tasks differently to reduce that chronic load? And if not, how do we manage it? Do they need a stretch break at two PM? Because that's when the chronic load tends to get the highest or do we need to manage their load differently by giving them breaks instead of one lunch break. Let's break that up into two breaks earlier and later in the day. And these are all concepts that we've explored with a lot of employers. And as soon as you've got data, you can explore it if it's just an opinion, people say ah yeah, but you know, that's your opinion, your opinion matters because you're a safety professional. But when your opinion is backed by data, that's when you say all right, that's when you get meetings with people to say, okay let's let's look into this and let's see what we can do to change it.
[00:20:08] spk_1: Yeah, that's that's great. Especially knowing that you're getting empirical data. That is good because you know the old adage about you know bad data in bad data out. So you're getting you know you're getting the good empirical data coming in which is gonna help you now with your safety system and if you're truly thinking of an organization and correct me if I'm I'm getting the gist right or not. But an organization should have organizational culture as opposed to just a safety culture and therefore if you're your safety department or even whoever's the monitoring person notices these things they can now imply or or at least in part some sort of mitigation mitigation such as a stretch and flex program or they might want to say let's go ahead and let's be more free with the brakes or something similar so that the workforce themselves will be less fatigued. But that means that now you're going to be tucked into the production person to say if we have production needs then we need to adjust it this way. So it seems like it's a whole of whole of organizational approach starting with the product, starting with the technology, is that fair to say
[00:21:25] spk_2: yes when you're measuring things and even we've had clients also have a type of shark tank competition so they'll say to the workers we've measured the chronic load for this acute load for this task to be here, you guys getting groups and see if you can come up with a solution and if you come up with a solution will measure it will measure all of the different solutions you come up with and the winner, the one that reduces the load the most will will fund it. But you'll also get a prize which might be a barbecue or some tickets to the football or the baseball. So that's not why you're in involving the workers in finding the solution, they're engaged, it's a competition, it's measured. So the result isn't someone saying oh we like that one better than that one, it's here, you quantify by quantifying the acute loading and say this is clearly better than what we're doing at the moment. So you guys are the winners. You've solved this problem for us and everyone's happy.
[00:22:22] spk_1: Excellent. And that's that's the truth idea behind what people are calling. Either safety differently or they're calling it. Where it's uh the term would be I guess the technical term might be human and organizational performance uh where you're looking at not only the human themselves but their activities, their task and how they fit into that environment. So now you're going to be challenging in the safety side the behavioral people or maybe you're you're giving them some some fuel, I don't know but there's people on the behavioral science side that they're just going to observe a behavior and then they're gonna want to mitigate from the behavior being observed, this could be a tool to help them. But then if they take it a step further and put it in, what I'm hearing you say is more of a learning team mode saying we identify these risk, let's get together and let's figure out from you know bottom up, how can we fix this
[00:23:26] spk_2: and the word. It's so funny that the workers are the experts and I remember when very early on in this journey, when I was actually sent out to do a site assessment and to do to deliver manual handling training to this publisher. So it was a book publisher and I had never done any of their tasks and I turned up and I've been given a power point of the correct lifting techniques and all of this information about how they should do their job. And I got rolled into this environment and these people came in for their arrows worth of manual handling training and they were all there with their T and their coffee and they just switched off and I just basically said this is ridiculous because you guys are the experts at how to do this task. So I can go through these slides and I can show you what the theory is on the best way of lifting and swimming or we can just start talking about it and you guys can tell me what you find is the most difficult part of what you're doing and let's see if we can put something together and go to management and take it to them and say, look here is the theory here are all the ways they should be doing it, but they can't do it that way because of all of these reasons that need to be addressed. And when I started talking like that, I could see the manager basically starting to pull his hair out, saying,
[00:24:46] spk_1: but
[00:24:47] spk_2: then afterwards it was, they said it was the best all of the staff came back and said, it's the best training they've ever got because they were asked, they were involved, it wasn't just some physiotherapists who has never actually been on the floor, like the warehouse have just come in for the day, told them what they think they should do and then left without actually understanding the physical demands of what these workers had to do. So that was, and I think that was like month number two of me leaving sports physio and heading into ohms and it really brought to my attention the fact that the workers need to be involved
[00:25:27] spk_1: Yeah. In your experience, now that you're starting to get more exposed to workers safety and health and the other side of, well, the stuff that I've been familiar with, stuff that the audiences feel familiar with, your coming in as an outside party, uh, as a whole, just maybe a little outside of the conversation, but as a whole, how do you think we're faring as an industry, to to try to protect the workers from, from the sample points that you're getting.
[00:25:55] spk_2: Yeah, the first and the first thing I noticed the strength of the safety, environmental safety industry was the amount of content that had been created. So I'd help these companies who had files and files worth of job task analysis or job dictionary or capacity capacity evaluations and all of these assessments and evaluations that have been done by credible economists and safety professionals. So really, really good content on what the risks were and suggestions on how to change it. That was not being used. There was either sitting on a shelf as a hard copy or sitting in people's computers like Yeah, yeah, we we did this ergonomics analysis on our process and it was a really, really thorough report that nobody did anything with. And so same with training, like I said, I went to this publisher and they had this incredible detailed manual handling training pack that wasn't being effective because the workers had to sit through a PowerPoint presentation that they didn't really care about. So as soon as you take that content and deliver it to workers in an engaging way that they can relate to, then all of a sudden that value can actually be used to change behavior. So the biggest thing I noticed was there's a lot of content there that could be valuable, but it wasn't because of the process of which it was being delivered to the workers. So we took a step back and say, okay, we've got this problem, We got this incredible content where the workers here, who aren't listening to it, if we can link them together by, first of all, breaking it down, delivering it to workers using Nudge theory of behavior change. So delivering training to workers in small amounts at increments throughout the year. But at times when it makes the biggest difference, which is when they're at work. So no point in dragging them off the work site, putting them in a training room, which is a completely different environment and showing them power points, they'll switch off. But if you take the modules, if you take the content and drip feed it to them throughout the year, where they do, they may do a three minute module at the beginning of every third shift that way there there there in the environment and it's problem solving. So it gets them thinking about it. So that was the first thing we did. We started using the content and delivering it to workers in a better way. But then we started packaging it with content that was relevant to them so they can say, well, yeah, this is manual handling training that's been decided on by a university who did research that's not relevant to me, if you pair that with videos and data of their coworkers, or even of them, if you show a worker a video of them with a chart showing what the load they all of a sudden go, that's me. And that Spike is the load on my back when I climb out of the truck without using three points of contact, I get it. Now. I was like, oh yeah, I've had safety people tell me use the handles, lower yourself down. Whatever I'm in a hurry, I'm going to jump out of that truck and go and unload the truck so I can get home. You show them a video and a chart. They don't have to be movement experts. But if they see there's a red line on the chart and the spike goes above the red line, they go, all right, that's bad. Let's do it again. And let's show them a video of what it looks like when they lower themselves down slowly. And that sticks with them. And they remember that. So all of a sudden this research and this, this safety training content that's really valid and it's reliable. And it's proven by research that actually becomes relevant to the worker and the worker gets it, and then they hopefully will change their behavior off the back of that. So that I suppose the biggest finding I found
[00:29:51] spk_1: was
[00:29:52] spk_2: taking that connection of the content and the expertise that's out there in the safety industry and a lot of people listening to this or watching this, they're experts.
[00:30:01] spk_1: How
[00:30:01] spk_2: do we get that expertise into the workers to change their behavior and that's the platform that we've built to help that.
[00:30:09] spk_1: Oh man, that's great. Because quite honestly, I like all of that is good. I mean like the board right there. Yeah, I pop up the board every now and then. So that was great because honestly, I feel like a, everybody always tries to corner me on my behavior based safety or am I human and organizational performance and I say it doesn't matter. At one point you really have to look at the workers. You're looking at the performance. Yes. And you're looking at if someone has an at risk behavior and then we're going to try to work that out. Yes. But even better than that, how can we each get our minds together? Talk about what's going on? Talk about the activities, even talk about things you may not want to, such as rules and regulations and things that are holding the workers back and now you can actually bring to light some of those things and together as a team, as a unit, you work together to solve it. So it seems like like the technology itself, especially since it's dealing with the number one overexertion has been the number one thing. Uh, that is the most costly for the insurance companies. So that's a major and businesses in the trickle down effect. But it's a major thing, but the mindset of it is, and then the idea of it is to me is if the company is all in it together, they're using the technology to start the conversation uh then that might end up being something where the organization as a whole could start talking about more things together. I'm gonna start working out things more. So it seems like like though your your your system is set to uh to recognize a hazard that is great hazard. The solution to everything is not only the data but and interpreting the data correctly but then the conversations it opens so is set the fair assessment on that one.
[00:32:22] spk_2: Yeah, 100%. And we from the day we set out on this journey, we wanted to build a tool that provided information to get people talking and to remove assumptions. As soon as you start removing assumptions and exploring different opportunities for different avenues to keep the workers safe then um that's the key. And that's been our goal from day one get as many sensors on as many workers because we know the reports will actually identify risks that can then be addressed.
[00:32:55] spk_1: Alright, excellent. Um any questions from anybody listening please go ahead and fill the chat box on linkedin editor. I said, I see you in the chat box there. Thank you. I guess I'm looking good. Apparently so. Thank you Edgar or maybe that was for scott. I don't know. He says looking good. So one of us is looking good. There we go. I'll go with that. Both of us are looking good. So if there's any questions or comments that you guys want to ask, especially if you're thinking about wearable technology, uh, this might be a good opportunity to do this. Um, and I do want to just find out a lot of my audience, especially those that are going to be listening on the podcast version of this. Uh they are starting their own business or they're ready to start their business. Uh how do you reach out to consultants or or get people who don't have an actual facility to go to day to day, how do they get involved in in being either partner with you or or something similar? You know, someone in my my field where I go to many different employers. How do we, how do we work with you on this?
[00:34:04] spk_2: Yeah. We actually have a partnership model to help safety professionals scale their services. So traditionally, you know, 10 years ago a safety professional was limited to the amount of hours. They could actually do site visits and then provide consulting services and then deliver reports. But like I said, it needs to be an ongoing sustainable engagement. And so if you actually have sensors left and you go to a site and you train them up on how to use the sensors. You've got a champion who's going to look after them and and then they rotate the sensors around the workers and they know how to do task assessments then you can actually provide your services online using our dashboard. So you go in. The data is coming in from anywhere around the world. We've got sensors throughout europe and and throughout asia pacific and of course throughout north America and you can be anywhere in the world and you can log into the dashboard, see what's happening with the data and then you can provide monthly updates to your client. Just go in look at the numbers say, alright, well the acute load for these tasks is coming down the chronic load for these locations. You can have different locations, this location for some reason the chronic loads going up with this particular occupation and we help with that of course because as I keep saying, I'm the science nerds, I love going into dashboards and saying look, can you help me with this and we jump in and say yes, look at these trends and here's how you can report this back to your your client. And that's a way of using the sensors to expand your scope. It's almost like each set of sensors is a set of eyes that you've left at that work site that can keep feeding you this information so you can keep providing value to these clients once you've, once you've left and once you've moved on to the next site and and it enables you to get more out of every hour of the day.
[00:36:00] spk_1: Awesome. Well, thank you. Um, got another question I know we're getting towards uh, are quitting time, but uh, for those people that have ideas or even those that are listening and they want to get into something, they're ready to launch out there, getting restless with where they are or they may have seen a need and they think I got the solution for this, you took action, you did it, you got a company behind you. What would be your tips that you would say to someone who wants? Yeah,
[00:36:36] spk_2: yeah,
[00:36:38] spk_1: I noticed the face there.
[00:36:40] spk_2: Yeah, I'm not, and I, you know, I went through accelerator programs and I got funding and I managed to get funds from investors because I was passionate about solving the problem. I'm not passionate about building this multiple global, huge unicorn of a company and that's why I get help. I get help to build the company. I'm passionate about solving a problem and it's hard work starting from scratch and building a product and then, and then you've got competitors coming in and copying and it is hard, so if you are thinking about heading down that path, I can definitely give you some advice, but if you need to be passionate about the problem, you're solving otherwise during the hard times. It is really tough to keep going because you're going to get kicked and you're going to get put down and I knew as soon as I started this, I had, I've seen firsthand the problem I'm trying to solve and I see it every day whenever I speak to my mother, the pain she's in, it's like that, that shouldn't have happened and I'm going to prevent that from happening to other people's mothers and fathers and family members and friends. And so it's been that passion and drive that got me through. Um as far as if you, you know, as far as advice on building a business, I'm the wrong person to talk to. But as far as advice on being passionate about solving a problem, then definitely if you're not 100% passionate about it, then it's going to be tough. If you are 100% passionate about it, then you'll have the fuel to get through and do what you need to do.
[00:38:16] spk_1: Alright, fair enough. See everyone knows when to stay in their lane, right? Or at least you would hope so Right now, that was just wonderful. I I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your insight. Any last thing that you'd like to share with the audience before we take off.
[00:38:33] spk_2: No, no, just thank you so much for doing this in the first place. It's an amazing thing that you do and we all, we all appreciate it and thanks for asking me to join you
[00:38:41] spk_1: now. That was awesome. Thank you so much for being on and being our first guest. This
[00:38:50] spk_0: episode has been powered by safety
[00:38:53] spk_1: FM.
[00:38:54] spk_0: The views and opinions expressed on this podcast or broadcast are those of the hosting its guests, and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the company. Examples of analysis discussed within the past hour are only examples. They should not be utilized in the real world as the only solution available as they are based on very limited and dated. Open source information, assumptions made within this analysis are not reflective of the position of the company. No part of this podcast or broadcast may be reproduced stored within a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means mechanical, electronic recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the creator of the podcast or broadcast. Sheldon grimace.
[00:00:02] spk_0: this episode is powered by safety FM.
[00:00:16] spk_1: Welcome to the safety consultant podcast. I'm your host, Sheldon promised this is the podcast where I teach you the business of being a safety consultant and in today's episode, we're going to learn a little bit about wearable safety technology as we talked to the Ceo and owner of prevention that is scott Coleman scott. Coleman was in the sports medicine field for two decades and actually over two decades and he was witnessing his mom as she was handling patients and she had received some injuries herself and some pain and doing that and he decided that there's a better way. So he used his understanding from sports medicine, we got a grant from the Australian government, worked with the University of Technology, Sydney and the University of Canterbury to develop test and validate the product and it's being used throughout many different countries to just help workers with their manual handling and how they're doing that and to create some sort of system to prevent injuries due to those activities. So in this episode we just get to know scott a little in his journey to creating the product, but then also his feeling about the safety industry and how we did this one was through a livestream. So I got back on, did a livestream, I'm going to try to do those more. So you'll see a calendar of live streaming coming up real soon. The best way for you to get that will be through, subscribing to this podcast so you can get all the information that you need. And also you can look me up on linkedin which is linkedin dot com forward slash in forward slash Sheldon Primus, you can see all the live streams on there, you can go to Youtube and look for safety consultant us and then you'll be able to get those streams there as well. Or you can join the facebook group, so you go to facebook dot com forward slash groups with an s forward slash safety consultant. So those are the ways you could see the live stream. I'm going to post a calendar of when I'll be doing those live streams but this one was a fun one with scott and we're able to really go dig deep into why he thought this was a way to help some people who were into safety field and just regular workers and just the benefits to using prevention will not be any extra stuff at the end of this episode. So, enjoy your week and truly get them. Alright, well, welcome welcome Mr Scott Coleman, my very first guest on this. See I surprised that one on you didn't I?
[00:03:18] spk_2: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I've been looking forward to this. So yeah, that's really exciting.
[00:03:24] spk_1: You know, it's been wonderful and facebook user, I do miss you too. Can you see any of the chats there scott?
[00:03:33] spk_2: Yeah, I can I can I did see that had like a Matrix, I thought I didn't get into the whole Matrix movie thing. I know people move in slow motion and things are pixelated. So I get
[00:03:43] spk_1: it. That's great. Well, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show and being part of it and um this is gonna be broadcast and rebroadcast over for those of you on the podcast there listening to this. This first came out on a livestream. So you're gonna have to get on my linkedin, my facebook groups uh and the youtube in order to get the live streaming in and that's all safety consultant is the branding if you will. So prevention before we talk about the preventer itself. Well, first tell me, um give us a hint of, of what got you into safety and health and I know it's going to lead into preventer as well. Uh so let's let's do a little bit of both. So a little bit of your background if you don't mind sir, and then also just tell us how, tell us what you got.
[00:04:36] spk_2: Yeah, of course. So, um my background of a sports physical therapist. So I I grew up doing a lot of sports getting injured, a lot fell in love with the sports physical therapy profession, went through college and studied it and then I took a break to focus more on injury prevention because the sports that I was treating the most were repetitive loading sports. So this is like more of your olympic sports. So rowing and track and field and swimming. And I found that in Australia in particular? So I'm sure you've all picked up my accent. I am Australian and in Australia we don't have the depth of talent that other countries have when it comes to olympic sports. So when we do have someone that's world class, we need to protect them. And so the Australian system involved using whatever systems possible to protect to identify injury risks early to prevent them happening. And these were like I said, repetitive loading sports. So it came about that my career ventured down this movement analysis path and the best way to analyze movements is through wearable technology. So I took a few years away from the physical therapy profession to become a bio bio mechanistic, focusing on wearable technology and movement analysis and, and you know, this was in the mid nineties. So I'm sorry in the mid nineties, the mid noughties. So leading up to the 2000 and eight, Beijing olympics was when I was really heavily involved in movement analysis for injury prevention and around that time my mother was working as a nurse, she was sort of heading towards the end of her career for the last decade of her career. And as we all know, nurses put the care of their patients before the care of themselves. She moved in a way to a patient had fallen. She moved in a way to help the patient and hurt her back and ended up having seven levels of her spine fused. And so at the time I thought, well, why were you moving the way you were moving? Was there a way that you could have identified the risk that you were under? And she had developed bad habits as a lot of these workers, especially health care workers, but workers in all physically demanding occupations, we all know they developed bad habits, whether it be shortcuts or whatever it is or whether it be movement patterns that they've developed to compensate for a previous injury. My mother had had a previous back injury and so she was moving in ways to compensate for that. Never had it had it had it addressed and as a result her injury led to an early career retirement and ongoing pain and suffering that's continuing today. So, while I was making a big difference, doing movement analysis in do prevention for these elite athletes, I realized the same process could easily be used to make an impact to the lives of millions of physical workers globally. So I started scratching the surface, asking my mom, you know, what was the injury prevention program like in the hospital that you worked? Eventually she had a safe lifting manual provided to her when she started 5 to 10 years prior and that was it. And that's safe lifting manual sat on the shelf in the head office and that that was it. And that's part of the reason why she ended up with an injury because there was no ongoing checkpoints to see whether her movement patterns were correct. There was no ongoing training. There was no refreshers. There was nothing. So I started thinking, all right, well, how can we translate or transfer a lot of the technology and the processes used to protect the world's best athletes across to the workplace. And that's that's what we did. So, I got support from the Australian government through a grant and we started and we got some partners who helped us test what we were doing. I work for a on one of the world's biggest insurance brokers in their people risk team two years to understand the needs of all the stakeholders being the workers most importantly, but the employers, the insurers, the brokers, the safety professionals as well. And we wanted to make sure that we built something that could be used by all stakeholders, not just build something to address the needs of the employer and neglect the worker or build something that reduced claims cost for the insurer, but neglected everyone else. We wanted to make sure that every stakeholder in this whole process is going to benefit from whatever we build. And now, and we're still on that journey. We've still got partners who are safety professionals. So we've built a tool for their tool belt that they can use to complement the services that they provide to provide evidence that what they're doing is actually making a difference. Because when you can measure it and say, here's what it was before we started here is what it is now after we've done the consulting services. But of course, you know, we want to make sure that the workers are alerted to when they are at an injury, an increased risk of an injury and then do something about it. And I suppose that's the long version of my journey to this point. And I think my journey is our journey. We've got a team.
[00:09:54] spk_1: Yeah. You got a good team though. You got, you know, even though you say it's your journey. Yes, I know it's anybody with the team. When you're saying you as the owner, you always mean the team too and you've got a wonderful team that's helping you out. Um, a lot of things struck me in that, um, in in your description and um, most of the time when people think about the movement part, especially when, you know, people are video gamers or something and they're thinking that you put all these sensors on somebody and then they get their signature move in the game because of those sensors and movements. So that's the first thing I thought about and I was like, hold on, this might be that same type of technology. Am I correct?
[00:10:36] spk_2: Well, yeah. And this was a journey, we're embarking on 8, 10 years ago where I started in sports, you measure everything because you really want to find that small area. First of all a performance improvement. But second of all you want to make sure that you do don't miss anything. So you measure everything and use all that data analysis to identify the injury risk. And I started doing that in the workplace and it was overwhelming and even now there's still wearable products available in the workplace that are still down that path of it's too much. And even the concept of paralysis by analysis you can actually go down such a rabbit hole with the data analysis that you lose the bigger picture. And so it took a lot of refinement to get to the point where, yeah, now we basically use one sensor that goes on the upper back that measures the trunk movement because we know it's the back injuries that have the biggest impact that the biggest cost, but also if there's a back injury, that's the biggest predictor of future injury as well. But also, you know, you've got a sensor on the back, it doesn't measure arm. So the other sensor just goes on the upper arm of one of the arms, usually the work and knows which arm does the most physical loads. So they put the sensor on that arm and that's it. We we originally had sensors on the legs but I realized that the sensor on the back could actually pick up most of the G forces or the impacts through the legs. So we didn't really need to to have sensors on the legs we do for special projects because I'm a science nerd. So if someone
[00:12:11] spk_1: says, look, we really
[00:12:12] spk_2: like to see more information on the knee load or the ankle angles, it's like Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's put more sensors on and let's do a special project. But the core product we have only has the two senses because we want it to be cost effective and user friendly for everyone to use. So we narrowed it down to just the two and they give us more than enough information to identify the movement patterns for different workers doing different
[00:12:37] spk_1: tasks. I'm imagining that some of the safety and health professionals that get your your information in and your your equipment And I'm sure as they're trying stuff out, they're looking at a lagging indicator, meaning the the activity has happened, but it seems like it's also a leading indicator because now you're seeing if there's a I don't know, I don't know if I'm reading into this technology, let me know, but but I've been a safety and health coordinator. I get into safety in '94. So it's been a while, but if you now see a worker who was starting to behave erratically or their movement is different. Now, can you prove possible impairment? Can you prove that maybe their minds not on the job today. Can you uh what has that been used for evil? That's all I'm trying to say because the safety and health and that's one of the things that that may happen with technology like that.
[00:13:41] spk_2: Yeah. 100%. And again, when I started this journey, I spent a lot of time with workers to the point where I would literally be walking around behind these warehouse workers with a laptop and they've got the senses and I had to be within 10 m. So I'd be running around while they're on forklifts trying to stay within 10 m. But when I spent a full shift with the mama asking them, what do you want out of this? What are you concerned about? What, how can you see this technology being used? And the biggest concern would be the biggest concern was first of all, they didn't want to be tracked. They didn't want someone in the in the office on a laptop being able to see exactly where they are and what they're doing every minute of the day. So that was the first thing we made sure we addressed no tracking and the communication behind the technology is the sensors measure the load, which is the physical demands of what they're doing. And so when you communicate it in that way you say to a worker, we know what you do is physical, We want to measure it because when we measure it, we can manage it and we can identify ways of reducing it. We don't want to track where you're going. We don't want to see how hard you're working. Because that was another thing early on. I had, again because I'm a science and I wanted to measure there's two types of load. There's external load which is the way they move, which is the biomechanics, which is what we focus on. But then there's internal load which is the way the body responds to the external load. So you can have two individuals moving in exactly the same way I would say it's two runners. For example two people running with a very very similar running pattern. They're not necessarily going to have the same heart rate because the internal load to run that way for one individual is different to another. So I thought, oh imagine if we could measure the internal load of all these workers you could work out who's moving more efficiently because their heart rates lower and but that workers are going no no, no, no I'm not interested in heart rate because that's a measure of exertion. And the boss could say you're not working hard enough because your heart rate is not as high as everyone else's. So you're slacking off. So we're straight away said no heart rate. No. Gps tracking. We wanted to measure the external load which is basically the way they move to exert a force because physical work is about exerting a force whether pushing or pulling objects, lifting, carrying whatever it is, it's about exerting the force and early on it was like, wow, I wanted to measure the force and we did, but then I realized that the force for a task is the same for all workers. So going back to the amazon example that you said before in those amazon warehouses, the force to move packages around that warehouse is the same for every individual, but every individual will exert that force differently by moving differently. You're going to have taller workers moving different to shorter, different gender, different injury history. Someone with a knee injury history is going to move differently to someone without a knee injury
[00:16:47] spk_1: history. That's what
[00:16:48] spk_2: we focus on. You measure the way the workers exert the force. Then going back to your lead or lag indicators, you can say all right, the lead indicators, we know workers moving in this particular way have a higher risk of overload. Let's address it before it becomes an injury before they get overloaded. And then the last bit of technical talk I'll go through is I've talked about internal external load. When you look at external load, there's two components and this concept has evolved through elite sport where all athletes no matter what the sport is that you'll see there's a lump in the back of their jersey, whether it be ice hockey, basketball, baseball, you name it, they're being monitored for load and the load is classified as acute load, which is for example the intensity or measuring the physical demands of a training session or a competition. So the acute load for a basketball game for our group of athletes is X. So there's a number for that and they can say, all right, well who's above, who's below that load number. If they're above the load number, we need to manage them differently than if they're below the load number. So that's the acute load and we can do that in the workplace. So a task is considered acute load where you measure the demands of a particular task and that's great. But then you want to look at how that looks over a shift and that's chronic load. So with an athlete, the chronic load would be the training cycle. All these athletes go through training cycles, so they go through peaks and recovery periods and that's the chronic load, which is made up from all of these acute
[00:18:32] spk_1: loads. So
[00:18:33] spk_2: we did the same in the workplace. We measured the demands throughout a full shift and that's the chronic load and then you get that balance like which workers are coping with the acute load and which ones are not, there's the lead indicator, let's do something with these workers who are not coping with the acute load. So the workers who are doing tasks in ways like my mother who had a bad habit, she was moving patients in a way she shouldn't have. So her acute load was not good, but her chronic load was also not good because she would fatigue quickly because she was getting older. And we know with aging workers they're less able to tolerate the chronic load, they will fatigue quicker. So when you measure it, you can see who the outliers are and say, alright, well here are the workers who are not coping with the chronic load. First of all, can we change what they're doing in a shift? Can we schedule tasks differently to reduce that chronic load? And if not, how do we manage it? Do they need a stretch break at two PM? Because that's when the chronic load tends to get the highest or do we need to manage their load differently by giving them breaks instead of one lunch break. Let's break that up into two breaks earlier and later in the day. And these are all concepts that we've explored with a lot of employers. And as soon as you've got data, you can explore it if it's just an opinion, people say ah yeah, but you know, that's your opinion, your opinion matters because you're a safety professional. But when your opinion is backed by data, that's when you say all right, that's when you get meetings with people to say, okay let's let's look into this and let's see what we can do to change it.
[00:20:08] spk_1: Yeah, that's that's great. Especially knowing that you're getting empirical data. That is good because you know the old adage about you know bad data in bad data out. So you're getting you know you're getting the good empirical data coming in which is gonna help you now with your safety system and if you're truly thinking of an organization and correct me if I'm I'm getting the gist right or not. But an organization should have organizational culture as opposed to just a safety culture and therefore if you're your safety department or even whoever's the monitoring person notices these things they can now imply or or at least in part some sort of mitigation mitigation such as a stretch and flex program or they might want to say let's go ahead and let's be more free with the brakes or something similar so that the workforce themselves will be less fatigued. But that means that now you're going to be tucked into the production person to say if we have production needs then we need to adjust it this way. So it seems like it's a whole of whole of organizational approach starting with the product, starting with the technology, is that fair to say
[00:21:25] spk_2: yes when you're measuring things and even we've had clients also have a type of shark tank competition so they'll say to the workers we've measured the chronic load for this acute load for this task to be here, you guys getting groups and see if you can come up with a solution and if you come up with a solution will measure it will measure all of the different solutions you come up with and the winner, the one that reduces the load the most will will fund it. But you'll also get a prize which might be a barbecue or some tickets to the football or the baseball. So that's not why you're in involving the workers in finding the solution, they're engaged, it's a competition, it's measured. So the result isn't someone saying oh we like that one better than that one, it's here, you quantify by quantifying the acute loading and say this is clearly better than what we're doing at the moment. So you guys are the winners. You've solved this problem for us and everyone's happy.
[00:22:22] spk_1: Excellent. And that's that's the truth idea behind what people are calling. Either safety differently or they're calling it. Where it's uh the term would be I guess the technical term might be human and organizational performance uh where you're looking at not only the human themselves but their activities, their task and how they fit into that environment. So now you're going to be challenging in the safety side the behavioral people or maybe you're you're giving them some some fuel, I don't know but there's people on the behavioral science side that they're just going to observe a behavior and then they're gonna want to mitigate from the behavior being observed, this could be a tool to help them. But then if they take it a step further and put it in, what I'm hearing you say is more of a learning team mode saying we identify these risk, let's get together and let's figure out from you know bottom up, how can we fix this
[00:23:26] spk_2: and the word. It's so funny that the workers are the experts and I remember when very early on in this journey, when I was actually sent out to do a site assessment and to do to deliver manual handling training to this publisher. So it was a book publisher and I had never done any of their tasks and I turned up and I've been given a power point of the correct lifting techniques and all of this information about how they should do their job. And I got rolled into this environment and these people came in for their arrows worth of manual handling training and they were all there with their T and their coffee and they just switched off and I just basically said this is ridiculous because you guys are the experts at how to do this task. So I can go through these slides and I can show you what the theory is on the best way of lifting and swimming or we can just start talking about it and you guys can tell me what you find is the most difficult part of what you're doing and let's see if we can put something together and go to management and take it to them and say, look here is the theory here are all the ways they should be doing it, but they can't do it that way because of all of these reasons that need to be addressed. And when I started talking like that, I could see the manager basically starting to pull his hair out, saying,
[00:24:46] spk_1: but
[00:24:47] spk_2: then afterwards it was, they said it was the best all of the staff came back and said, it's the best training they've ever got because they were asked, they were involved, it wasn't just some physiotherapists who has never actually been on the floor, like the warehouse have just come in for the day, told them what they think they should do and then left without actually understanding the physical demands of what these workers had to do. So that was, and I think that was like month number two of me leaving sports physio and heading into ohms and it really brought to my attention the fact that the workers need to be involved
[00:25:27] spk_1: Yeah. In your experience, now that you're starting to get more exposed to workers safety and health and the other side of, well, the stuff that I've been familiar with, stuff that the audiences feel familiar with, your coming in as an outside party, uh, as a whole, just maybe a little outside of the conversation, but as a whole, how do you think we're faring as an industry, to to try to protect the workers from, from the sample points that you're getting.
[00:25:55] spk_2: Yeah, the first and the first thing I noticed the strength of the safety, environmental safety industry was the amount of content that had been created. So I'd help these companies who had files and files worth of job task analysis or job dictionary or capacity capacity evaluations and all of these assessments and evaluations that have been done by credible economists and safety professionals. So really, really good content on what the risks were and suggestions on how to change it. That was not being used. There was either sitting on a shelf as a hard copy or sitting in people's computers like Yeah, yeah, we we did this ergonomics analysis on our process and it was a really, really thorough report that nobody did anything with. And so same with training, like I said, I went to this publisher and they had this incredible detailed manual handling training pack that wasn't being effective because the workers had to sit through a PowerPoint presentation that they didn't really care about. So as soon as you take that content and deliver it to workers in an engaging way that they can relate to, then all of a sudden that value can actually be used to change behavior. So the biggest thing I noticed was there's a lot of content there that could be valuable, but it wasn't because of the process of which it was being delivered to the workers. So we took a step back and say, okay, we've got this problem, We got this incredible content where the workers here, who aren't listening to it, if we can link them together by, first of all, breaking it down, delivering it to workers using Nudge theory of behavior change. So delivering training to workers in small amounts at increments throughout the year. But at times when it makes the biggest difference, which is when they're at work. So no point in dragging them off the work site, putting them in a training room, which is a completely different environment and showing them power points, they'll switch off. But if you take the modules, if you take the content and drip feed it to them throughout the year, where they do, they may do a three minute module at the beginning of every third shift that way there there there in the environment and it's problem solving. So it gets them thinking about it. So that was the first thing we did. We started using the content and delivering it to workers in a better way. But then we started packaging it with content that was relevant to them so they can say, well, yeah, this is manual handling training that's been decided on by a university who did research that's not relevant to me, if you pair that with videos and data of their coworkers, or even of them, if you show a worker a video of them with a chart showing what the load they all of a sudden go, that's me. And that Spike is the load on my back when I climb out of the truck without using three points of contact, I get it. Now. I was like, oh yeah, I've had safety people tell me use the handles, lower yourself down. Whatever I'm in a hurry, I'm going to jump out of that truck and go and unload the truck so I can get home. You show them a video and a chart. They don't have to be movement experts. But if they see there's a red line on the chart and the spike goes above the red line, they go, all right, that's bad. Let's do it again. And let's show them a video of what it looks like when they lower themselves down slowly. And that sticks with them. And they remember that. So all of a sudden this research and this, this safety training content that's really valid and it's reliable. And it's proven by research that actually becomes relevant to the worker and the worker gets it, and then they hopefully will change their behavior off the back of that. So that I suppose the biggest finding I found
[00:29:51] spk_1: was
[00:29:52] spk_2: taking that connection of the content and the expertise that's out there in the safety industry and a lot of people listening to this or watching this, they're experts.
[00:30:01] spk_1: How
[00:30:01] spk_2: do we get that expertise into the workers to change their behavior and that's the platform that we've built to help that.
[00:30:09] spk_1: Oh man, that's great. Because quite honestly, I like all of that is good. I mean like the board right there. Yeah, I pop up the board every now and then. So that was great because honestly, I feel like a, everybody always tries to corner me on my behavior based safety or am I human and organizational performance and I say it doesn't matter. At one point you really have to look at the workers. You're looking at the performance. Yes. And you're looking at if someone has an at risk behavior and then we're going to try to work that out. Yes. But even better than that, how can we each get our minds together? Talk about what's going on? Talk about the activities, even talk about things you may not want to, such as rules and regulations and things that are holding the workers back and now you can actually bring to light some of those things and together as a team, as a unit, you work together to solve it. So it seems like like the technology itself, especially since it's dealing with the number one overexertion has been the number one thing. Uh, that is the most costly for the insurance companies. So that's a major and businesses in the trickle down effect. But it's a major thing, but the mindset of it is, and then the idea of it is to me is if the company is all in it together, they're using the technology to start the conversation uh then that might end up being something where the organization as a whole could start talking about more things together. I'm gonna start working out things more. So it seems like like though your your your system is set to uh to recognize a hazard that is great hazard. The solution to everything is not only the data but and interpreting the data correctly but then the conversations it opens so is set the fair assessment on that one.
[00:32:22] spk_2: Yeah, 100%. And we from the day we set out on this journey, we wanted to build a tool that provided information to get people talking and to remove assumptions. As soon as you start removing assumptions and exploring different opportunities for different avenues to keep the workers safe then um that's the key. And that's been our goal from day one get as many sensors on as many workers because we know the reports will actually identify risks that can then be addressed.
[00:32:55] spk_1: Alright, excellent. Um any questions from anybody listening please go ahead and fill the chat box on linkedin editor. I said, I see you in the chat box there. Thank you. I guess I'm looking good. Apparently so. Thank you Edgar or maybe that was for scott. I don't know. He says looking good. So one of us is looking good. There we go. I'll go with that. Both of us are looking good. So if there's any questions or comments that you guys want to ask, especially if you're thinking about wearable technology, uh, this might be a good opportunity to do this. Um, and I do want to just find out a lot of my audience, especially those that are going to be listening on the podcast version of this. Uh they are starting their own business or they're ready to start their business. Uh how do you reach out to consultants or or get people who don't have an actual facility to go to day to day, how do they get involved in in being either partner with you or or something similar? You know, someone in my my field where I go to many different employers. How do we, how do we work with you on this?
[00:34:04] spk_2: Yeah. We actually have a partnership model to help safety professionals scale their services. So traditionally, you know, 10 years ago a safety professional was limited to the amount of hours. They could actually do site visits and then provide consulting services and then deliver reports. But like I said, it needs to be an ongoing sustainable engagement. And so if you actually have sensors left and you go to a site and you train them up on how to use the sensors. You've got a champion who's going to look after them and and then they rotate the sensors around the workers and they know how to do task assessments then you can actually provide your services online using our dashboard. So you go in. The data is coming in from anywhere around the world. We've got sensors throughout europe and and throughout asia pacific and of course throughout north America and you can be anywhere in the world and you can log into the dashboard, see what's happening with the data and then you can provide monthly updates to your client. Just go in look at the numbers say, alright, well the acute load for these tasks is coming down the chronic load for these locations. You can have different locations, this location for some reason the chronic loads going up with this particular occupation and we help with that of course because as I keep saying, I'm the science nerds, I love going into dashboards and saying look, can you help me with this and we jump in and say yes, look at these trends and here's how you can report this back to your your client. And that's a way of using the sensors to expand your scope. It's almost like each set of sensors is a set of eyes that you've left at that work site that can keep feeding you this information so you can keep providing value to these clients once you've, once you've left and once you've moved on to the next site and and it enables you to get more out of every hour of the day.
[00:36:00] spk_1: Awesome. Well, thank you. Um, got another question I know we're getting towards uh, are quitting time, but uh, for those people that have ideas or even those that are listening and they want to get into something, they're ready to launch out there, getting restless with where they are or they may have seen a need and they think I got the solution for this, you took action, you did it, you got a company behind you. What would be your tips that you would say to someone who wants? Yeah,
[00:36:36] spk_2: yeah,
[00:36:38] spk_1: I noticed the face there.
[00:36:40] spk_2: Yeah, I'm not, and I, you know, I went through accelerator programs and I got funding and I managed to get funds from investors because I was passionate about solving the problem. I'm not passionate about building this multiple global, huge unicorn of a company and that's why I get help. I get help to build the company. I'm passionate about solving a problem and it's hard work starting from scratch and building a product and then, and then you've got competitors coming in and copying and it is hard, so if you are thinking about heading down that path, I can definitely give you some advice, but if you need to be passionate about the problem, you're solving otherwise during the hard times. It is really tough to keep going because you're going to get kicked and you're going to get put down and I knew as soon as I started this, I had, I've seen firsthand the problem I'm trying to solve and I see it every day whenever I speak to my mother, the pain she's in, it's like that, that shouldn't have happened and I'm going to prevent that from happening to other people's mothers and fathers and family members and friends. And so it's been that passion and drive that got me through. Um as far as if you, you know, as far as advice on building a business, I'm the wrong person to talk to. But as far as advice on being passionate about solving a problem, then definitely if you're not 100% passionate about it, then it's going to be tough. If you are 100% passionate about it, then you'll have the fuel to get through and do what you need to do.
[00:38:16] spk_1: Alright, fair enough. See everyone knows when to stay in their lane, right? Or at least you would hope so Right now, that was just wonderful. I I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your insight. Any last thing that you'd like to share with the audience before we take off.
[00:38:33] spk_2: No, no, just thank you so much for doing this in the first place. It's an amazing thing that you do and we all, we all appreciate it and thanks for asking me to join you
[00:38:41] spk_1: now. That was awesome. Thank you so much for being on and being our first guest. This
[00:38:50] spk_0: episode has been powered by safety
[00:38:53] spk_1: FM.
[00:38:54] spk_0: The views and opinions expressed on this podcast or broadcast are those of the hosting its guests, and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the company. Examples of analysis discussed within the past hour are only examples. They should not be utilized in the real world as the only solution available as they are based on very limited and dated. Open source information, assumptions made within this analysis are not reflective of the position of the company. No part of this podcast or broadcast may be reproduced stored within a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means mechanical, electronic recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the creator of the podcast or broadcast. Sheldon grimace.
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