Smart Safety
A proof of concept that turned mandatory safety equipment into a smart wearable: shorter waiting time for on-site engineers, safer miners, better on-site productivity.
Proof of concept · exploratory work.
Product goals
- 01Create a mobile solution for engineers heading to remote mine sites to fix machinery.
- 02Reduce miners' waiting time for on-site engineering support and machinery repair.
- 03Keep workers safe in hazardous underground and surface conditions.
- 04Improve miner productivity without compromising safety.
About the client
A global automotive leader with vehicles on the road in 100+ countries. 95+ years of heritage across truck, bus, and construction equipment divisions. Beyond passenger safety, the client is a dominant force in the mining industry, delivering heavy-duty haulers and excavators built for extreme conditions.
Known for sustainable engineering and reliability, the client continues to set the standard for industrial innovation.
Initial briefing
The proof of concept started with the client asking for a mobile solution to support machinery fixing for engineers, worker safety, and productivity for miners on-site in India.
Personal safety equipment is required in hazardous conditions. Sites include both underground and surface mines. Internet connectivity is often low or non-existent.
Discovery and strategy (business)
We started with a discovery to understand the client's business model, existing tech partnerships, and how those changes were expected to affect day-to-day work across several industries.
We also learned the client's communications focus on reliability, productivity at lower cost, and safety.
Discovery and research (users)
With the client's business direction in mind, we kept momentum with the requested mobile solution but reframed it. Instead of a phone app, we proposed a proof of concept for miners: upgrade their mandatory personal safety equipment so it would serve both purposes at once, protection and repair support.
Define, wireframe and prototype
First direction: mobile app
The starting point was a mobile app for miners that used image recognition and sound analysis to identify quick machinery fixes, letting them repair equipment on the spot without waiting for an engineer to travel to the site. The app would analyse sound or images to provide step-by-step guidance, and send notifications when something went wrong (hazardous gases, for example) so miners could evacuate safely.
The pivot: Smart Safety concept
Since the client's positioning centred on reliability, productivity at lower cost, and safety, we concluded a mobile app wasn't the fastest or safest option. Miners would still need engineers on-site for anything complex, which cuts into productivity.
We pivoted to a Smart Safety concept: use the miner's existing personal safety equipment not only for safety, but for everything the mobile app would do. The first Smart Safety product would be a Safety Glass with high-contrast colours, clear voice-command guidance, AI, machine learning, image recognition, sound analysis, augmented reality for step-by-step repair, and IoT.
Connectivity
Since internet connectivity is a significant challenge at these sites, features like calls would need reliable infrastructure to work: Wi-Fi access points inside and around the mines, or satellite connectivity.
Core interactions
- After analysing machinery, complex fixes are escalated to an expert engineer via voice call. Voice commands guide the miner through each step.
- In dangerous situations (downpour, hazardous gases, hazardous materials) the glasses ask the miner to evacuate, and voice commands lead them to the next step.
- AR wayfinding surfaces the closest exit, direction, and an estimated time to reach it.
- Safety recognition based on the current state of the mine and the equipment in use.
What comes next
Next steps for scaling the Smart Safety partnership: noise-cancelling earplugs for protection and voice guidance, gloves with sensors connected to the glasses, textiles that sense environmental changes and share information with other Smart Safety devices, and expanded AR navigation.
Results
- Proof of concept delivered in 6 weeks, reframing a mobile-app brief into a Smart Wearable product line.
- Established a scalable Smart Safety concept: glasses first, with a documented roadmap for earplugs, gloves, and instrumented textiles.
- The client validated the direction and roadmap for continued exploration.