Initiative seeks to unlock potential of health and safety data

HSE has teamed up with the Lloyd’s Register Foundation to develop new techniques aimed at sifting through safety data to help better share the lessons learned, including from industrial accidents.

The partners note that every year huge amounts of incident investigation findings and operational health and safety data are collected globally. Along with the University of Manchester’s Thomas Ashton Institute they have launched a new programme called Discovering Safety that aims to substantially improve health and safety and ultimately save lives, particularly in poor or developing nations.

Working with a range of stakeholders including industry, trade groups, academia and governments, the long-term initiative seeks to develop new techniques to aggregate and analyse health and safety data from sources around the world. This will involve applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to health and safety concepts and advancing areas such as text mining and language processing.

Ruth Boumphrey, director of research at the Lloyd’s Register Foundation, said: “Everybody deserves to be safe at work. This programme will help us learn lessons from data and share knowledge between industries and across international borders. The more we can share, the better the insights, the safer the workers. There are huge technical challenges in this programme, but the rewards will be great.”