Every year, thousands of people–an average of three per day–die from accidents on construction sites in the United States alone. One of the driving forces behind this trend is the paucity of safety inspectors. In New York alone between 2011 and 2015, there was a nearly 30 percent drop in the number of safety inspections conducted on site.
Now, some engineers are turning to tech to make the safety inspection process easier and more accessible, turning construction sites less deadly in the process.
This is the promise of OnSiteIQ, a startup founded in February 2017. The program, usable from anywhere and on any device, allows anyone to remotely inspect a construction site using a technology-based documentation system, promising to cut down on the fatalities, injuries, and insurance costs.
Here’s how it works: the company deploys a small team of data collectors, each armed with a 360-degree camera mounted onto their hardhat, to walk through an entire construction site twice monthly, recording all the while. This video is then uploaded onto the platform, and the collected images are automatically mapped onto a copy of the site’s floor plans using a built-in computer vision algorithm. The result is what some would call a 3-D “panograph” – a large, wraparound digital image created from these photos and video clips strung together.
Because all of the collected data is geolocalized and timestamped, users can pinpoint exactly when and where site conditions might be changing. An artificial intelligence system trained to highlight potential safety hazards expedites this process. This is all a far cry from the traditional, pen-and-paper methods used to document, inspect and assess the potential hazards on a construction site.
In short, it “enables any stakeholder from any location to virtually walk the site and do their own inspection,” says CEO Ardalan Khosrowpour.
This program also consolidates this data into easy-to-read graphs, allowing users to quickly track when, where, and how often a particular safety issue, like a missing guardrail, occurs. Through location-based technology, OnSiteIQ tracks where the most safety issues are occurring on the job site. All of this together allows users to quickly assess and eliminate any potential safety risks, and any comments about a site can instantly be annotated, tracked, and shared among those that need to know.
Khosrowpour presented OnSiteIQ at the BuiltWorlds Project Conference this past week at Grand Central Tech in Manhattan. The conference was dedicated to discussing the emerging technologies meant to augment city planning and architecture.
OnSiteIQ was one of the finalists of the NYC Startup Challenge – a shark tank-style pitching session, where CEOs of five selected technology-based startups presented their projects to a panel of judges from the construction and urban planning fields. The winner would attend this year’s Builtworld Summit: a prime opportunity to drum up new clientele and reach potential investors.
While the competition was close, OnSiteIQ only snagged second place. Though the judges liked the concept, their main concern was whether the computer vision technology could catch every safety issue every time.
Since its inception, OnSiteIQ has collected over 3.5 million square feet of data using its twice-monthly data collection model. The program is available through a monthly subscription from the program’s website, with three different tiers available depending on the services required for a project and on what a user needs. They can choose to focus on documentation and safety inspection alone, or they can subscribe to a package that includes risk-assessment technology.
https://archpaper.com/2018/03/onsiteiq-startup-safer-smarter-construction-site/
