A major workers’ compensation insurance carrier is planning to “tag” workers with individual movement trackers in the name of safety. Privacy issues were not addressed in the announcement.
American International Group, Inc. (NYSE:AIG) today announced a strategic investment in Human Condition Safety (HCS), an early-stage technology startup company developing wearable devices, analytics, and systems to improve worker safety.
AIG Commercial Insurance CEO Rob Schimek will discussed the HCS investment at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, as part of a broader conversation about the Internet of Things and the potential for disruptive innovations to make the world a safer place.
Human Condition Safety is creating tools that help workers, their managers, and worksite owners prevent injuries before they happen. Incorporating wearable devices, artificial intelligence, building information modeling, and cloud computing, the product and service offering is designed for industries that hold the highest risk for workers, including manufacturing, energy, warehousing and distribution, and construction.
“AIG’s embrace of innovative, disruptive technologies is opening new ways for us to strategically partner with our clients,” said Mr. Schimek. “In this case, the technology from HCS will help enable us to work with clients to make their worksites safer places for their employees and help reduce our clients’ overall cost of risk. We will continue to look for more opportunities with firms like HCS that set the pace for mitigating and managing risks in ways unthinkable just a few years ago.”
In collaboration with key strategic partners including AIG, HCS is conducting a set of pilots to demonstrate how its proprietary technology creates measureable improvements to reduce the frequency and severity of work-related injuries.
Peter E. Raymond, CEO of HCS, said, “It’s not acceptable that we can push a button and have anything in the world delivered to our doorstep, but that people can still get hurt and even die needlessly when they go to work. With HCS tools, we leverage technology to keep people healthy and safe.”
HCS is AIG’s latest investment in technology that supports data driven approaches to partner with clients as they manage increasingly complex risks. It follows an initial $4 million investment with Clemson University to develop a risk engineering and analytics center to enhance the understanding of risk and ways to mitigate it, as well as a substantial investment in the build out of AIG’s global risk engineering capabilities.
