For this Company Spotlight, we interviewed Guardhat’s Co-Founder and CEO (Saikat Dey) and Chief Marketing Officer (Sarah Kalhorn) about how the company is pioneering connected technology to improve safety and collaboration with and among frontline industrial workers. Guardhat offers a proprietary connected worker platform – ability to ingest, manage and analyze unstructured data; easy to deploy monitoring and reporting software; patented, wearable technology; and a growing ecosystem of partner integrations. For more information on Guardhat, please visit guardhat.com.

Background: Before co-founding Guardhat in 2014, Saikat Dey was an executive for a multinational steel manufacturer and mining company. During his time there, a recurring objective was improving workforce safety and eliminating common/preventable accidents. However, after mapping out all the information related to worker safety that should be collected and features/equipment required to do so, Saikat discovered that there was not an integrated solution offered in the market. Once the business units that Saikat led were divested, he decided to build a platform that enables both employers and employees to better prioritize industrial workplace safety.

The first problem Guardhat had to solve was how to collect data reliably and accurately about workers and their environment, such as location, air quality, ambient temperature/pressure, body temperature, blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen levels, etc., which it did through the introduction of its smart hardhat. Once the data collection component had been addressed, Guardhat’s software platform was developed to ingest, analyze, and provide actionable insights to unstructured data from connected wearables/devices.

Value Proposition: Guardhat’s platform enables customers to enhance worker safety processes through the following unique characteristics:

Industrial Internet of People (IIoP): Given that people aren’t “things,” Guardhat does not monitor workers the same way that a sensor is monitored in that information about a worker (e.g. location) can be configured to not be made available to anyone until that worker is determined to either be at a high risk of injury / has been involved in an accident or broadcasted at all times depending on the organization’s goals and securing worker consent. Instead of being viewed as a monitoring solution, workers see Guardhat as a lifeline they can rely on when they’re in danger, which helps to relieve any privacy concerns they may have.
Single Source of Truth & Wide Compatibility: Guardhat’s software solution provides a unified system or “information highway” for all smart devices, including most third-party sensors/wearables in addition to its own smart wearables. This eliminates the “hyperconnectivity” problem of requiring a customer to have numerous backends to support several disparate data streams.
Relevant & Contextualized Insights: By providing only the most pertinent information to its users, Guardhat enables rapid and correct action to be taken to either prevent or properly attend to accidents. For example, it can alert managers when there are unauthorized personnel in a certain area. Another example is that when a worker is detected to have fallen, Guardhat automatically relays the potential reason(s) for the fall and the type of environment that worker is currently in so that a response team can be dispatched with the correct PPE and treatment tools.

Closing Thoughts: Many industrial executives will tell you that their worst experience on the job was when they had to inform families of a relative’s death occurring on their watch. Given not only the economic impact but the significant social impact that solutions like Guardhat’s will deliver, we look forward to following the IIoP sector, as it continues to make industrial workplaces safer.

Company Spotlights

March 2022