• The latest round of innovation challenges from the Lloyd’s Register Safety Accelerator, ‘Innovation in Detecting Safety Risks in Critical Infrastructure Industries’, offers startups trial funding and partnerships with leading commercial partners: Scorpio, Pacific International Lines, Infratek and Odfjell Drilling.
• The Round 2 Innovation Challenges seek digital entrepreneurs with innovative solutions to improve the detection of complex safety hazards and risks in marine, offshore and energy industries.
• Winners will receive additional support from Lloyd’s Register and Plug and Play.

The Lloyd’s Register Safety Accelerator has opened a call to find innovative solutions to improve how complex safety risks are detected and managed in challenging industrial environments. This latest round of innovation challenges from the Safety Accelerator is designed to improve safety of life and assets in heavy industries.

Marine, offshore and energy jobs are some of the most dangerous in the world, where the consequences of errors are high, potentially deadly. Developments in technologies such as computer vision, artificial intelligence, and wearables are opening up the opportunity to radically improve how safety risks are identified and managed, from human factors to operational issues.

Up to four startup winners will receive trial funding for their solution as well as the opportunity to collaborate with commercial partners to accelerate the development of their technologies. Partners for this challenge round include: Scorpio, Pacific International Lines, Infratek and Odfjell Drilling.

The winning entrepreneurs will retain 100 percent of their IP, as well as receive access to domain expertise and entrepreneurial support to help bring their solution to market though support from Lloyd’s Register and Plug and Play respectively.

The four challenge areas and partners are:

• Marine Incident Insights with Scorpio, a leading global shipping company. This challenge seeks to help ship operators gather and analyse data about crew behaviour and the onboard work environment, whilst safeguarding user privacy, to develop a deeper understanding of why wrong decisions happen and ultimately to improve processes, training and staffing to reduce risk of human error incidents.

• Determining Master’s and Crew’s Psychological and Emotional Health with Pacific International Lines (PIL), the 9th largest containership operator in the world. This challenge seeks innovative methods to assess the psychological and emotional wellbeing of individual crew members in real-time whilst they are onboard and before they are about to go on duty, whilst protecting user privacy, to ensure the safety and health of the concerned seafarer as well as the safety of others onboard, the vessels and the marine environment.

• AI-Driven Real-Time Error Detection with Infratek, a leading total supplier in the Nordic region in the fields of electrical grids, lighting and railway systems. This challenge seeks innovative proposals for solutions to offer real-time feedback to infrastructure workers to ensure a job is done completely and correctly before leaving a site, to improve safety for the worker and third parties.

• Video Detection of Physical Asset Changes to Prevent Falling Objects with Odfjell Drilling, an international drilling, well service and engineering company. This challenge seeks to enable oil and gas drilling operators to use drilling sites’ existing closed-circuit camera network to detect significant changes to a rig’s infrastructure that could result in falling objects injuring workers and damaging the asset.

Richard Clegg, Chief Executive, Lloyd’s Register Foundation, said: “We are delighted to launch the Innovation in Detecting Safety Risks in Critical Infrastructure Industries’ Challenge Round which is focussed on harnessing new and emerging technologies to identify safety risks, from human factors such as mental health which could affect a seafarers’ ability to perform their job safely, to operational factors, such as the potential for falling objects from assets. We are excited to support startups developing solutions to these challenges, which could not only solve these use cases, but also have potential to significantly improve safety across a wide range of commercial industries.”

Maurizio Pilu, Vice President of Digital Innovation, Lloyd’s Register, said: “Digital technology is transforming the world in which we and our industry partners operate, providing the opportunity for develop radical, life-saving tools and approaches. The Safety Accelerator brings together startups and the industry to work together to explore these opportunities and test innovative digital solutions to some of the toughest safety and risk challenges, and accelerate the adoption of cutting edge safetytech to create safer working environments, and a safer world.”

The deadline for applications is 19 October, 2018. Shortlisted entries will be invited to a live pitch and Q&A with a panel of judges taking place in London on 28 November 2018. The launch of trials for successful applicants is scheduled to take place in February 2019.
The Safety Accelerator is a joint initiative between Lloyd’s Register, one of the world’s leading providers of professional services for engineering and technology and Lloyd’s Register Foundation, a charitable foundation helping to protect life and property by supporting engineering-related education, public engagement and the application of research, which is funding the programme.

The Safety Accelerator is run in partnership with Plug and Play, the largest global innovation platform and most active venture capital fund in Silicon Valley.

For more information about the Lloyd’s Register Safety Accelerator, including how to become an industry challenge partner, or applying to solve a challenge, please visit the Lloyd’s Register Safety Accelerator website.

Key dates

Challenges open: 1 October 2018
Application deadline: 19 October 2018
Finalists notified: 2 November 2018
Innovation Day: 28 November 2018
Winners Announced: 28 November 2018
Trials Launched: From February 2019