Serious work place incidents are all too common – in 2017 Safe Work reported 195 Australians lost their lives and 107,355 suffered serious traumatic injuries in work place incidents. The national impact was estimated at $AU61.8 billion, the associated property aspect at $AU17 billion and as a nation we spend $AU100+ billion annually on prevention, insurance, and compensation.

Closer to home – an internal review suggested 15.4% of Laing O’Rourke Australia’s recorded incidents 2008-2018 may have been Toolbox Spotter preventable. Furthermore, analysis of Safe Work’s data reveals that ‘heavy’ construction operations significantly and disproportionally contribute to incidents and that over 84% of all incidents name a failure in spotting, distraction, lapses of attention, and/or communications as a key factor in the incident occurring.

Laing O’Rourke has been developing and extensively trailing Toolbox Spotter to address this very need. Toolbox Spotter is a frontedge hand tool suitable for on-the-dirt immediate integration into complex works. It is equipped with a spotter’s proactive intelligence and ability to enable operations. This advanced ecosystem of extra sets of never tiring, always alert, always diligent, intelligent eyes has its mind on the team and its focus on the job. It sees and understands without special tags, markers or processes – Toolbox Spotter jumps straight onto the team to reduce fatalities, traumatic injuries, and property incidents, enable otherwise non-possible works, and decrease resource, workers’ compensation and insurance costs; All while driving inherent safety in operations principles.

R&D thus far has seen 10,000s of hours of extensive R&D testing and exploration over a range of conditions; rain, sun, overcast, dusk and dawn, dusty, clear and crowded. These efforts resulted in a compelling and patented proof-of-concept with operations endorsement and with real impact – For instance, in the image above, the operator clearly saw the entire group of people behind him leave the area, but Toolbox Spotter saw a person in the blind spot and the operator was alerted. The operator was under pressure, believed the area was clear and was ready to return to work, but instead voiced concern at which point an unseen person in the blind spot responded. The operator asserted that Toolbox Spotter had just saved a life!