StrongArm's smartwatch-sized sensor tracks workers and alerts them to potential hazards.
Workplace technology startup StrongArm was founded nearly a decade ago, in 2013, by Sean Petterson. Now chief executive, Petterson started the company with the mission to help so-called “industrial athletes” protect themselves from “preventable workplace strain, injury, and death,” according to his bio on StrongArm’s website. The company touts a 52% year-over-year reduction in workplace injuries, as well as the 35,000 people who uses its proprietary SafeWork system. The company has collected over 30 million hours of data.
To date, StrongArm has raised more than $65 million in venture capital funding.
The impetus for StrongArm’s creation stems from a deeply personal place for Petterson, whose father died as a result of an injury sustained while working at his self-owned construction company. The incident pushed Petterson to do his part to help ensure nothing like what happened to his dad would happen to anyone else ever again. In an interview earlier this month, Petterson told me he discovered there was “pretty limited innovation” after surveying the workplace safety realm. He initially set out to build Tony Stark-like exoskeletons for workers to wear that assisted them in lifting heavy items they otherwise couldn’t be able to handle. Those suits “worked pretty well” and they remain near and dear to his heart, Petterson said, but the team ultimately decided on pivoting elsewhere. The idea of distributing hoards of these extremely cool but expensive suits to thousands of employees, however noble, was deemed untenable pragmatically.
The path forward became repurposing an element of the exoskeleton’s technology.
“We developed a sensor that was paired with an algorithm that we developed while learning how to build exoskeletons. So all the things that we built in the laboratory from spinal kinematics and data movement risk analysis, we put onto a chip and made that mass deployable,” Petterson said of their newfound solution. “The core of our system is we have a smart dock, which is a 25-unit docking station with a smart screen on it. And that deploys all the sensors at the the warehouses [and] the manufacturing environments that we operate in. A user walks up to that system [and] scans their badge [and] it gives them a little heads-up as to their safety score. Then the sensor glows blue, they pick it [up] off the dock and clip it on their hip—or they put it on the back of their shirt—and they’re off to the races. What the sensor is doing is looking out for anything risky they’re about to do.”
The sensors are fitted with accelerometers and other environmental sensors; StrongArm uses a good bit of machine learning to interpret data, which is delivered to the cloud. The actual wearable piece is about the size of a smartwatch.
The most complex job for the sensor is doing the ergonomics assessment.
“We’re assessing how you’re moving [and] how you’re performing your task,” he said. “When you’re about to do something that puts you at risk of a musculoskeletal injury, we’re going to deliver haptic feedback. What that does is kind of like a tap on the shoulder to say, ‘Hey, slow down, you’re about to hurt yourself.’ [It helps remind the person to] just reset and go back [and] go back about your day with the right posture and the right technique.”
In addition to assessing ergonomics, StrongArm’s sensor also tracks proximity, alerting someone when they’re about to turn into a blind corner, for example. “It’s kind of like just having a coach looking out for you, tapping on the shoulder when something’s dangerous is going to happen,” Petterson said.
Cool though it was, the shift from superhero exoskeleton to a relatively simplistic sensor (compared to looking like Iron Man) proved to be prescient for Petterson and team. What StrongArm’s customers were really hungry for more data, which is exactly what the new approach was intended to provide. Such an analytical approach has enabled StrongArm and their customers precisely how much they’re helping others work more easily with their technology.
“The data we’re pulling down is not just alerting the industrial athletes, but we’re informing operations about how to avoid this risk in the future. So the data is pretty comprehensive,” Petterson said. “An athlete gets something simple, a metric that he or her is able to improve upon and use that as their baseline. But when it gets into the ecosystem, it really gets granted. So for EHS [environmental health and safety], we’re delivering them risk insight, that gives them an ROI [return on investment] to make further investments in safety.”
When asked about feedback from others, Petterson explained the majority are grateful somebody like his company took on the challenge to innovate in the workplace safety space. Workers are able to go home at night and be with their children instead of laid up on the couch; likewise, marital relations are better and there’s less reliance on painkillers. In other words, the overall quality of life, inside and outside of work, because of the work Petterson and team is doing.
As for his hopes and dreams for the future, Petterson’s goal is simple: “create a more suitable workforce for industrial athletes,” he said. It’s imperative to keep humans safe on the job, he told me, because the truth is full robotization is still decades away technologically. The fact of the matter is workplace injuries can be major disabling events. What Petterson and StrongArm are doing is a form of accessibility in terms of accommodating workers (and employers) minimize risk.
“[It’s about creating] a better future for industrial athletes [and] how create better value. How we perceive their value better so that there is a new way to perceive the value of manual labor in the future by these large corporations,” Petterson said. “[It’s about] how we create more connections in the ecosystem to make that financial picture abundantly clear, and then help create insights on our data to help transform the workflows in the daily workday of an industrial athlete.”
