Following on from last weeks blog 'Rise in industry 4.0 and industrial AI technologies in workplaces and current and future opportunities for more proactive health and safety: Part 1', here is part2, third in the series.
In the previous article, I considered the AI dimension of industry 4.0 and offered a perspective on how the emergence in use of industry 4.0 and AI technologies in workplaces is opening up opportunities for more proactive industrial decision-making in relation to how health and safety is practiced. In this article, I consider future technological opportunities on the horizon in a bit more detail.
As highlighted previously, real practical examples of deployment of AI based technologies in industrial workplaces, specifically for health and safety purposes, are already numerous and continue to grow. This trend is only likely to continue with many other use cases already on the horizon. For example, many representatives from across asset rich industries, such as aerospace, automotive, power and utilities, are strong advocates of use of AI based technologies to help in the inspection of assets for structural health monitoring purposes, to overcome the challenges associated with manual inspection of assets. For assets in remote locations, offshore, for example, or dams and viaducts in rural locations, the safety gains to be realised by combining use of remote visual inspection technologies with AI, ML and video analytic techniques, to negate the need for workers to undertake such tasks, are obviously substantial.