Increasing amounts of digital data are being collected on construction sites. Analyzing that information can help contractors understand and predict risk in project delivery – one of the largest risk factors being safety.
Fatality and total incident rates in the construction industry have plateaued for the last 10 years, but a partnership between Newmetrix and StructionSite aims to improve those rates using artificial intelligence (AI).
Newmetrix is a construction technology company that uses AI and advanced analytics to reduce safety risk. StructionSite is a photo and video site documentation app that enables contractors to track project progress. The integration allows StructionSite users to get enhanced data from the 360 jobsite videos and images they are already collecting on the app.
Newmetrix’s platform automatically pulls image and video data from StructionSite. The platform’s AI, “Vinnie,” then analyzes the images to identify more than 100 safety risks, such as work at height, housekeeping, improper ergonomics.
Using predictive analytics, Vinnie combines the image data with other project data to determine the level of safety risk for each project and predicts which 20% of the projects will be responsible for 80% of the risk. Construction companies can use this data to focus their safety efforts on the projects where they will have the most impact.
“Newmetrix has been analyzing StructionSite images from our projects for 18 months,” said Takashi Tsuchiya, deputy section manager at Obayashi Construction. “So far the Safety AI has generated over 1.2 million tags that our safety and project teams can use as opportunities for conversation. As a specific example, over 9,500 examples of housekeeping and 4,500 examples of standing water were identified by the Safety AI. This increases the number of relevant conversations we can have about safety and helps prioritize the teams’ actions. The integration boosts the number of images to generate more tags.”
By integrating Newmetrix and StructionSite, construction companies can:
- Use the visual documentation that’s already being collected to create opportunities for safety engagement and to predict safety risks
- Prevent safety issues before they arise
- Protect profitability with lower recordable incident rates and fewer claims
- Use a predictive-based safety program to negotiate a better insurance rate
Figuring out what to do with the vast amounts of incoming data from construction sites can be overwhelming, but technology can help contractors make better decisions faster and prevent incidents before they occur.