Industry leading civil engineering contractor BAM Nuttall, is collaborating with Australian firm SmartCap Technologies Pty Ltd, the world’s fastest growing company in the fatigue monitoring arena, to explore potential innovative solutions to tiredness levels in construction workers.

Being trialled on one of BAM Nuttall’s rail sector projects in Wales, is the newly released SmartCap wearable technology system, Life by SmartCap. The new, second generation product consists of the LifeBand which can be worn on its own or worn inside a worker’s safety helmet. It utilises brain activity to provide operator fatigue alerts, via Bluetooth to the Life App, as the risk of microsleep is identified.

“BAM Nuttall has a real appetite to explore technology solutions around the issues regarding health and safety on site,” says Colin Evison, Head of Innovation at BAM Nuttall. “After hearing about SmartCap’s success with drivers of vehicles in Australian mining operations, we made initial contact last year with their team to see whether they could transfer their technology to suit more of a construction environment. Things have progressed and we now have five units being tested on our rail framework in Wales and a trial in Scotland is imminent too.”

Life will give out early warning alerts to vehicle drivers or operators of plant if they show the early signs of fatigue. This wearable technology is the most accurate fatigue monitoring solution on the market at 94.7% and could prove crucial to protecting lives of workers who work unsociable hours and whose role includes extensive travelling.

“It’s still early days, but early results indicate that fatigue awareness is already raised by those wearing the LifeBand. This device is effective in detecting symptoms of fatigue; something many people may be unaware of when at work, ensuring our workforce is safe on and off site.”

Darryn Fisher, Vice President of Global Sales & Marketing at SmartCap says: “We are delighted to have expanded into the UK construction market with BAM Nuttall; previously our only client in the UK was in the marine shipping industry. Our team is committed to making sure that everyone gets home safely each and every day so we designed Life to ensure that its users are empowered to make this possible.

Our predictive technology will help to develop techniques to effectively manage fatigue and raise alarms to guarantee BAM Nuttall’s workforce is safe.”

The original technology behind Life was advanced within CRCMining, a Cooperative Research Centre established by the Australian government and supported by 4 universities and 13 industry partners including equipment manufacturers and mining companies. The first-generation product was created back in 2006 and has recently won The Premier of Queensland’s Exporter of the Year Award 2016.

SmartCap is also nominated as a finalist in two categories’ at the 2017 Wearable Technologies Innovation World Cup, held in Munich this March.