Balfour Beatty, BAM Nuttall and Heathrow Airport will work with Discovering Safety, a new health and safety regulatory sandbox that will develop risk management
Three major construction and infrastructure companies have agreed to participate in the Industrial Safetytech Regulatory Sandbox, the world’s first regulatory sandbox for industrial safetytech.
Balfour Beatty, BAM Nuttall and Heathrow Airport will explore new opportunities to improve safety and risk management with Discovering Safety, a programme of work delivered by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), and Safetytech Accelerator, a technology accelerator dedicated to advancing safetytech in industry.
Boosting compliance and safetytech in industry
The health and safety regulatory sandbox aims to explore ways to undertake assessment and compliance activities more effectively, to help accelerate the adoption of proven safetytech products in industry, and to understand and reduce barriers that might delay the development of new life-saving technologies.
It will focus initially around significant areas of risk in construction, including falls from height, vehicle collisions, crane operations and manual handling.
They will be joined by UK-based technology companies with products and services designed to improve safety and risk management in industrial workplaces.
Safetytech Accelerator started recruiting technology participants for the sandbox in February.
The regulatory sandbox will explore the risk management potential of technologies such as analytics, automation and AI
Andrew Rippington, health and safety lead in BAM Nuttall’s Safety Department, commented: “We find this project really interesting and welcome the chance to support innovators with real-world experiences that will inform the sandbox and keep solutions useable. We’re keen to identify challenges and also identify areas where we can enhance.”
Roly Latif, head of health, safety and wellbeing for Heathrow Infrastructure, comments: “It’s exciting to have the opportunity to work with experts and encourage knowledge sharing and innovation. Supporting experts in developing technology-led solutions that solve old and new problems could change the risk profile of future Infrastructure projects.”
Dr Maurizio Pilu, managing director at Safetytech Accelerator, comments: “Industrial partners are vital for exploring how new technologies such as AI, analytics, wearables, drones and robotics improve safety and risk management. We are excited about partnering with these companies for the sandbox and, hopefully, helping industrial safetytech innovations through to wider adoption in the construction industry and beyond. ”
