Overview
The consequences of skill shortages are emerging and effect businesses in many different ways. Do the following situations not seem all too familiar: A job in the field cannot be completed due to lack of specialist knowledge; a completed job in the field does not meet quality expectations; or a job in the field takes longer to complete than it should.
The resultant costs are often enormous: extended repair and maintenance downtime, dispatch of senior technicians or experts to remote locations, missed opportunities for junior staff to learn on-the-job, and sometimes, unfortunately, accidents.
This is why Fortescue Metals Group have just ordered six Beta V prototypes of our eHat. They recognise how the capability and productivity of their field workforce can be boosted by a new way of letting their staff connect with experts and supervisors through a communication enabled hard hat.
The Solution: eHat
Letting field staff connect ‘hands-free’ with supervisors or with specialists and doing so by allowing both to engage interactively and safely with a common vision of the job at hand would improve quality and accuracy of the task, speed up decision-making and avoid the incurrence of significant costs and waste.
eHat is a certified, lightweight and balanced hard hat with integrated video, lights, headphones, microphone and batteries. eHat communicates through a dedicated smartphone app and is embedded in a cloud-based network that enables live-streaming of video and audio over distances of thousands of kilometers. Knowledge transfer made easy.
As an application developed within the Internet of Things, the utility of eHat can be enhanced further by offering services generated from collecting, storing, analysing and retrieving server data. Examples of such services from this knowledge network include video recording, video analysis, person down indicator and usage to name a few.
The eHat – Wearable industrial technology & knowledge services.
Our Market Opportunity
Generally, the eHat has meaningful use cases across a whole range of industrial and professional applications. These arise with work or on-the-job training activities being conducted away from experts and/or supervision. We focus our initial efforts on local industries that have hard hat requirements for safety reasons and have selected mining, construction, telecommunications, utilities and agriculture as primary target sectors.
Using data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, we estimate the following hard hat populations: Mining (30K), Construction (530K), Telecommunications (4K), Utilities (30K), Agriculture (30K). 624K in total across those sectors. We further estimate that figures for international markets would be a multiple of this, possibly up to twenty times. In support of penetrating the US and other key global mining markets, a Letter of Intent has been signed with Becker Varis (Canada), an international technology leader and system supplier and distributor of mining communication infrastructure.