NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019 COVER STORY
FUTURE DANGERS
Health & safety should be the primary concern of all
manufacturing leaders; can the latest technology help
make the shopfl oor even safer than it currently is?
19
BY CHRIS BECK
www.manufacturingmanagement.co.uk
The area of Somalia around Aden Adde
International Airport, in the country’s
capital, Mogadishu, is one of the most
dangerous places in the world. Regular
terrorist attacks (at least 14 bombings
have taken place in Mogadishu since
2010), the constant threat of violence and
hundreds of hidden landmines mean the majority
of people using the airport fl y in and straight
back out again, never leaving the relative safety
of its terminal.
Of those who do venture out, a signifi cant
Bringing safety to
unsafe environments
VRAI’s system, called
Hazardous Environment
Awareness Training (HEAT),
uses virtual reality and
analytics to simulate potentially
dangerous situations in a safe
way. “We have analytics that
can track where people are
looking, so we could tell them
afterwards that they looked
proportion come from the United Nations’ Mine
Action Service (UNMAS), and the soldiers of the
African Union (AU) defence force. It is their job
to scour the local fi elds and roads looking for
mines, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and
other potential hazards. Unsurprisingly, this is an
extremely dangerous job: one in 10 is either killed
or seriously injured while on patrol.
Spotting a potential landmine or IED requires
a keen eye and an intuition that can only come
from years of practice – noticing a slightly
disturbed bit of soil, or an unnaturally placed
piece of rubbish that to the untrained eye would
look entirely mundane. And then, doing this
under immense pressure, where any wrong move
or slip of the hand could result in disaster.
Training the UNMAS and AU workers is
something of a Catch-22 situation – not doing
so would mean civilians were being put at risk,
whereas doing so means putting people in an
extremely dangerous, high-pressure environment.
Luckily, the latest technology is coming to
the rescue. Irish start-up, VRAI, is using virtual
reality to provide training in a safe and controlled
environment. Pat O’Connor, VRAI’s managing
director, explains more: “It’s all well and good
explaining to people in a lecture theatre what a
potential IED could look like at the side of the
road,” he says. “But imagine doing that for real
and knowing that underneath any piece of rubbish
could be a bomb.”
straight at four IEDs and didn’t
spot them,” explains O’Connor.
This was the eureka
moment for VRAI. O’Connor
and his colleagues quickly
realised that the technology
had applications beyond the
military. “When we talk about
a hazardous environment, you
get extremes – minefi elds and
the military are obviously at the
far end of that,” says O’Connor.
“If we could make a product
that works in such a hostile
environment, it would also
work in other hazardous places,
including on the factory fl oor.”
Now, while the average day
on the shopfl oor is unlikely to
involve a risk of landmines,
factories are still one of the
most dangerous working
environments around.
“There’s often a lot
of machinery
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