Over 4,000 U.S. workers die on the job every year, and more than 3 million get injured. New wearable technologies are aggressively entering consumer applications (Fitbit, Skully, Apple Watch) but industrial safety equipment has not seen any fundamental innovation in the last decade.

GuardHat addresses this issue with its "smart hard hat ecosystem", essentially an IoT device in a hard hat form factor. GuardHat is an industrial wearable that uses IoT and wireless communications systems to protect and empower industrial workers. By collecting and analyzing sensor-based data, GuardHat blends existing and emerging technologies to prevent safety incidents and to intervene more effectively when incidents happen.

The GuardHat ecosystem includes a comprehensive Big Data software platform that gathers large volumes of sensor and M2M data, and analyzes this data stream in real-time using a Complex Event Processing engine to detect and act upon potential safety events. The architecture is modular and scalable to address future application integrations and flexibility in deployment. Reliability and performance are key, and the dynamic nature of the usage scenarios dictates the need for a rapid development toolset, all of which are addressed by HPCC Systems.

The GuardHat open platform can also deploy additional applications involving real-time access to the front line workforce. Preliminary analyses indicate that up to 20% of severe incidents could be prevented by GuardHat which is a potential market-value savings of $30-50 billion per year based on U.S. businesses incurring over $250 billion in annual safety related costs.

Anupam Sengupta

Co-Founder & CTO,
GuardHat

Anupam is a co-founder and the CTO of GuardHat. Previously, Anupam served as the CIO of Severstal North America, a subsidiary of OAO Severstal, a global metals and mining company. At Severstal NA, Anupam managed over $15 million of IT/technology annual projects and operations, and lead the successful divestiture and new integration of the IT assets and systems in September 2014 to AK Steel and Steel Dynamics.

Anupam joined Severstal from Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), the world's fourth largest IT/Technology consulting firm, where he served as a Senior Consultant in the Banking and Financials practice.

Anupam has over 18 years of extensive and cross-functional experience in Enterprise Information Technology and Consulting. In his last role with TCS, Anupam served as the client partner at PNC Bank, the sixth largest retail bank in the U.S., where he managed a 900-person team of architects, managers, developers and engineers in an $80 million portfolio of systems and IT infrastructure. Anupam has global technology expertise with substantial work experience across Europe, Asia and North America.

He has worked in the past with American Express, Ameriprise Financial, Deutsche Bank and Toyota Financial Services in various technology and management leadership roles. He holds an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from the National Institute of Technology in India.