Wearable saving lives
Designing wearable saving lives is a key mission statement for Intellinium and a strong motivation for our team. Every 15 seconds, worldwide, a worker dies from a work-related accident or disease. In Europe only, 3.720 workers died in 2013. It’s a worldwide plague concerning everyone. Our project is about saving workers’ lives thanks to an innovative Smart PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) able to predict accident and to reduce emergency response time for injured workers. Our Smart Safety Shoes solution can be proposed as an integrated safety shoe or as an add-on device that can be plugged to any shoes.
The genesis of our innovation
In 2014, the company Intellinium was contacted by Enedis (formerly known as ERDF) to help workers facing growing aggression risks. A few months after, the first smart and connected safety shoe was born. At this time, we were not anticipating that we were opening the “Pandora’s box” with many more industrial safety, security and health functionalities to come. In 2016, we applied for our first patent. In 2017, we finalized our first field prototype reaching a TRL 7 product development. At the same time, we validated business viability and market traction. In 2018, we have started integrating our technologies on trekking shoes to protect outdoors adventurers.
A burden for everyone...
Not only our product helps solving a societal challenge (saving workers’ lives) but we also address the tremendous economic burden for companies and community. Whatever private or publicly mutualized, the cost of work-related accident represents billions of euros that could be used for job creation or training, innovation or even low-carbon transformation. But it’s still here to compensate for unacceptable work-related facilities in emerging and western countries too. By saving lives and reducing injuries severity, Intellinium will help companies and community alike to save billions of euros and thousands of workers’ lives. We have been studying past fatal accidents and we concluded that some workers could have been saved if they were equipped with our technology.
Our innovation strength comes from a basic idea: choosing a PPE that is always worn by all workers, that is non-obtrusive, discrete, mass produced and located far away from sensitive body part. The safety shoe was the perfect candidate. The next step was to transform this “passive PPE” into a “smart PPE” able to connect to several networks, to make its own decision, to handle local analytics and to resist harsh and extreme conditions. The last step was to ensure that this innovative wearable was able to predict accidents and to indicate highly risky situation to workers as a truly “worker hub” protecting anywhere anytime without being intrusive for the worker. The Smart & Connected Safety Shoes AI-enabled powered by Intellinium was born and it is a European worldwide innovation breakthrough.
Even for the planet itself: a low-carbon smart PPE !
Last but not the least, our solution has been designed to save hundreds of tons of hardware waste by reducing and replacing substantially the electronic equipment worn by workers. For instance, our innovation makes man-down and alert button obsolete as well as partially the smartphone itself. We also reduce weight and number of equipment worn by the worker, as well as overall smart PPE energy consumption positioning Intellinium as low-carbon company helping to fight climate change effects and resources shortage.
