Tended’s safety solution for trackside workers gains product acceptance
UK-based company Tended has received product acceptance for its solution to improve the safety of trackside workers, which was developed and tested with Network Rail.
The solution of Tended helps railway companies improve the safety of trackside workers by enabling them to map out safe and unsafe zones using geofence technology. When track workers leave a safe zone or approach an unsafe zone boundary, they are alerted via a small wearable device. The wearable is accompanied by an online dashboard, where the safety zones on worksites can be mapped.
“Safety in the rail industry is critical. Working with Network Rail, we’ve heard first-hand how workers have had seconds to jump out of the way of high-speed trains”, says Tended’s CEO and founder Leo Scott Smith. “Every incident on the rail network causes major disruption whether it’s caused by an accident or a piece of equipment left on the track; they can lead to huge costs and delays.”
The newly gained product acceptance comes after two years of R&D and testing in live environments alongside Network Rail and their trackside workforce.
Preventing human errors
Tended focuses on human factors and places behavioural science and psychology at the forefront of the product design, “recognising that between 80-90 per cent of occupational accidents are caused by human error.” The real-time alerts to the track workers are designed to nudge workers into safer behaviours, helping to promote safer decisions and actions over time. By analysing the statistics of boundary breaches in the online dashboard, evidence-based safety improvement policies can be formulated.
Tended’s solution recently won in the Engineering and Safety category at the Railway Industry Association Innovation Awards 2022 held on July 1st in the UK. Earlier this year, the company allied with Unipart Rail to deploy the solution across rail networks, making the solution available as a hired, leased, managed service or sale, along with support including end-user and administrator training, logistics and nationwide distribution, 24/7 support and proactive maintenance of hardware.
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