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How to Use the Apple Watch for Safety at Work
Using Your Apple Watch to Stay Safe at Work
Whether it’s working outdoors, in confined spaces, or as a first responder, some jobs are inherently dangerous, and an accident could have life-threatening consequences. Did you know that it's estimated that 7,500 people die every day due to their occupation? About 15% are from short-term accidents. Even worse, about 85% of occupational long-term illness and injuries occur from chronic exposure to stressors like noise, chemicals, and heat.
It’s why more company leaders and safety managers are looking to technology to help them prevent risk and injury to their workforce.
And the Apple Watch is a prime candidate for meeting this need.
Through its sensors and different apps, the Apple Watch can monitor and report key health and safety features like heart rate, heart rhythm irregularities, step count, noise exposure, and other behaviors and health metrics. Apple has also enabled safety features like fall detection that can automatically connect you to emergency services if it detects a fall and no user response.
But what if you or your safety attendant want to be alerted of more than detected falls? What if you could be alerted that you're at risk of heat stress and should drink water? Or, that you've come in contact with reduced atmospheric oxygen and your O2 saturation is low?
These are the types of real-time alerts that are now possible with your Apple Watch. Keep reading to learn how.
Apple Watch Limitations for Health and Safety Monitoring
While the Apple Watch is a useful and modern feat of engineering, it does have its limitations for people working in high-risk professions, including:
- It doesn’t contain sensors you may use to prevent risk and injury including gas sensors or ionizing radiation detectors.
- It doesn’t seamlessly correlate data across the health applications available in the Apple Marketplace for both users and employers. This makes it more difficult to accurately understand your health and safety risk even though you can monitor a range of health data.
- It doesn’t allow groups of people to simultaneously and continuously share health and data to help monitor each other’s safety.
- It doesn’t provide predictive insights and risk prevention recommendations. For example, it’s not piecing together data such as body temperature, exterior temperature, etc. to predict common but preventable injuries - such as heat stress – and push a notification that alerts of the risk.
Apple’s Partnerships to Improve Safety Capabilities
This is why Apple is partnering with other companies to make relevant features possible and accessible. Why reinvent capabilities if you can partner with other trustworthy brands that have made significant innovations?
This includes VigiLife’s SafeGuard Live app. Organizations ranging from the US Air Force, Boeing and NASA, and public safety departments are early adopters of SafeGuard and use it as part of their health and safety programs.
Thanks to SafeGuard, users can pair their Apple Watch with the SafeGuard Live app and other third-party sensors to better monitor their health and safety.
Benefits of Pairing Apple Watch with SafeGuard Live
Here are some additional worker safety benefits you can gain by pairing SafeGuard Live with your Apple Watch.
Create Teams and Groups
SafeGuard allows users to create teams and groups that are managed by a “guardian” team member. The team and group members can enable sharing of specific health, safety and location data so that the guardian can be alerted if one or several of the members needs assistance.
For example, if a group is working in different confined spaces, the user (i.e. safety attendant or manager) acting as the guardian can send invites to everyone to join a SafeGuard Live group. When the group members have monitoring enabled, the guardian may view in real-time where each user is located and be alerted if one or more members indicate signs of needing assistance. This is different from the current capability of the Apple Watch notifying emergency contacts of your location after a fall has already occurred.
Unlock Additional Monitoring Capabilities
SafeGuard is compatible with many popular third-party sensors and monitors. It not only records multiple data sources across health, environment, location and behavior but applies machine learning and AI to get predictive insights. For example, heart rate, motion profile, posture, GPS and gas detection data combined can give you a comprehensive understanding of an individual's environment and physiological response —something not possible with single sensors or dissociated data. By pairing SafeGuard Live and third-party sensors, you will be able to receive metrics and alerts right from your Apple Watch.
Receive Predictive Alerts with Preventive Recommendations
Heat stress, along with many other illnesses and injuries, are preventable with the appropriate measurement, analysis, and mitigative steps. The problem is that many people don't recognize the signs and symptoms until it's too late. By leveraging sensors on the Apple Watch, SafeGuard Live can alert you to these preventable injuries.
It’s similar to how the Apple Watch can prompt you to stand or walk when it’s monitored that you haven’t moved for a long period. The more you wear the Apple Watch paired with SafeGuard, the more that historical data can be used to determine what your normal baselines are for heat acclimation, heart rhythms, and other health and safety indicators. Then, when your body shows abnormal trends, you can be alerted in time to take preventive action. This could look like a notification alerting you that you are at risk of heat strain and should take immediate action like drinking water or resting.
Overheating is just one of many use cases for using data to be more predictive and prevent injury or illness and SafeGuard is preparing to roll out more predictive capabilities.
Gain Insights to Improve Health and Safety Strategy
When using Apple Watch in conjunction with other sensors, managers no longer have to spend time piecing together data from disparate sources to make sense of the risk and health of their teams. Instead, they have instant access to these insights across their teams and can make more data-driven decisions about the health and safety of their workforce with more ease, speed, and assurance.
The insights are so powerful, companies may even leverage the data to negotiate better worker insurance premiums.
Next Steps
The SafeGuard Live app is available as a free trial to everyone through the Apple Marketplace.
If you’re responsible for the health and safety of a group of people, create a profile and invite your team so you can test its capabilities. The benefits apply to multiple groups, including:
If you have questions, contact VigiLife and one of our team members will be happy to visit with you.
