DuPont Sustainable Solutions (DSS) has announced a partnership with Bleenco GmbH to, they say, develop advanced, scalable, artificial intelligence-powered solutions to better protect workers from operational risks and COVID-19.

Alexey Lesin, Digital Practice Leader for DSS, said: “We are seeing industrial companies embrace new safety technologies within their operating environments and, in doing so, they are uncovering opportunities to identify individual risks or risky behaviours and transform this into actionable data.

“This has provided companies with unprecedented opportunities to improve the safety of workers, as well as operational workflows by harnessing the insights drawn from this data. The technologies and associated algorithms developed by Bleenco are particularly promising in this regard, especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Irman Abdic, CEO of Munich-based Bleenco, said the company’s technologies enable off-the-shelf cameras with advanced, customisable safety automation solutions. “This allows operations leaders to quantify and analyse human behaviour, as well as monitor compliance without compromising privacy. Such insights can help leaders to identify safety risks in real time, and also to uncover opportunities to prevent future incidents.”

Abdic added: “Additionally, this technology is currently being deployed to help companies to detect a key symptom of COVID-19: body temperature. The body scan is fully automated and only takes one second, allowing companies of all industries to limit potential exposure of their front-line workers to the virus.”

Mining companies have been employing such cameras at their operations around the globe to identify potential COVID-19 cases and safeguard their wider workforce.

The partnership agreement between DuPont Sustainable Solutions and Bleenco allows companies to customise, deploy and scale-up the technologies in a quick, sustainable manner, they say.

Lesin concluded: “The combination of this innovative Bleenco technology, with the experience of DuPont Sustainable Solutions in both behavioural safety and large-scale technology deployment, will help companies to keep their employees safe and healthy. The pilot results were inspiring and have shown that this partnership has the ability to help industrial companies to make a genuine breakthrough in their safety performance.”