MakuSafe Announces Launch Of Wearable Safety Technology To Reduce Injuries

Now taking reservations for a “Safety-as-a-Service” deployment

West Des Moines, IA (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) - MākuSafe, an Iowa-based technology company, will launch their award-winning wearable armband device and MākuSmart SaaS platform in March after completing final testing and certification.

The company plans to produce a limited amount of hardware devices for 2020, of which approximately a third has already been reserved by industrial users and workers compensation insurers. With the public launch, MākuSafe will also release the newest version of their safety management software, called MākuSmart 2.0.

Since the organization’s founding, MākuSafe has pioneered innovative wearable technology and analytic software to help identify and reduce workplace safety risks. Their patented wearable armband device gathers data on potential hazards and makes it available to EHS leaders in near real-time. This data includes voice recorded near-misses, hazardous human motion like slips or trips, and environmental indicators—such as air quality, light levels, temperature, humidity, noise, barometric pressure and air quality. The safety data feeds into MākuSafe’s powerful cloud-based analytics platform, MākuSmart. The platform uses machine learning and predictive analytics to identify potentially hazardous conditions and generate alerts.

By identifying potential risks and hazards, a company can work to preemptively eliminate possible workplace incidents and injuries that could result in workers’ compensation claims. The resulting focus on understanding working conditions in real-time and reducing accidents also helps organizations build a culture of health and safety in the workplace.

“The day has finally come where we have proven our technology works, and we can be an agent of change in the workplace,” said Gabriel Glynn, CEO and co-founder of MākuSafe. “Each day across the world, thousands of employees suffer workplace injuries. Many don’t go home at the end of the day. We’re creating a product to change that, and it’s exciting to see companies embrace what we are doing.”

The launch comes after four years of development and field testing with several iterations of the wearable device and analytics platform. MākuSafe recently concluded a round of paid pilot deployments using its go-to-market solution. Participants included a number of industrial end-users, as well as insurers and their policyholders. Running concurrently in six states for an average of four months in each operation, work environments included welding, robotics, warehousing, steel and wood fabrication, and assembly sites. Workers logged more than 75,000 wearable hours in these locations. Millions of data points were gathered resulting in 660 actionable investigations that uncovered numerous confirmed hazards. In the minds of users, these incidents represented more than $600,000 in potential loss avoidance. This provides an estimated return on investment of more than 1,000%, even if users paid the annual subscription rate and gained no further benefit for the remaining eight months of the term.

One of the earliest adopters and pilot companies for the MākuSafe systems was EMC Insurance. The Des Moines-based insurance carrier, specializing in workers’ compensation, deployed pilots of both MākuSafe hardware and software with policyholder sites.

“We recognize this technology is game changing and critically important for our policyholders,” said Bryon Snethen, vice president of risk improvement for EMC. “We want to provide our agents and policyholders value beyond insurance. Cutting-edge technology that reduces potential injury in the workplace and using predictive data to identify risks before something happens are some of the ways we’re pursuing that.”

Last October, MākuSafe was named the 2019 ACORD InsurTech Innovation Challenge (AIIC) winner in Boston. In January 2020, BrokerTech Ventures chose MākuSafe to be part of its accelerator program focused on delivering innovation to the insurance agent-broker industry, and MākuSafe was named a Prometheus Awards finalist for InsurTech Company of the Year by The Technology Association of Iowa.

Each day around the world, more than 1,000 people die in workplace accidents. In the U.S. alone, more than $1.2 billion is paid out each week in workers compensation claims, with the average pay out at $46,000 for a slip and fall incident, according to the National Safety Council.

About MākuSafe
MākuSafe is an award-winning safety data and analytics company based in America's Heartland. Our mission is to improve worker health, safety, and productivity while reducing worker compensation claims and mitigating workplace hazards and risk exposures. Founded in 2016, MākuSafe developed patented wearable technology that gathers; real-time leading indicators of environmental conditions, potentially hazardous motion data, near-miss voice memos from workers, and the location of these occurrences within a facility or site. Their cloud platform, MākuSmart, can take in data from additional IoT sources and uses machine learning to identify high-risk trends in the facility. The portal makes hazard intelligence immediately actionable, proactively targets remediation resources to specific conditions and occurrences, and streamlines compliance reporting. The MākuSafe system respects worker privacy while positively impacting safety culture and mindset. MākuSafe delivers their product through insurance carriers, as well as direct to industrial end-users. Learn more at https://youtu.be/wXcgMJz4LoI (video) or https://makusafe.com/news

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