Emily Whitcomb, director of the National Safety Council's Work to Zero initiative, believes the safety profession has come a long way in reducing workplace injury rates over the last 25 years. "Unfortunately," she states, "our fatality rates have been stagnant in that period, and thousands of workers are still dying on the job every year.
"The Work to Zero initiative, she explains, "wants to push our safety leaders to consider how to design out the risk for workers using innovative safety technologies," such as augmented and virtual reality, drones, machine learning, sensors and wearables, robots and cobots.
"Better design, eliminating or engineering out the risk should be top of mind for our safety leaders," Whitcomb says. "There are many lifesaving technologies on the market today, so why is adoption so slow? We are on the cusp of the next evolution of our safety journey, and I’m excited to be leading it through the Work to Zero initiative."
In this video presentation from last fall's Safety Leadership Conference 2020, Whitcomb reviews the most hazardous situations workers can be in and what relevant technology solutions can mitigate the risk.