AI for workplace health and safety

• AI may increase the scope of work tasks where a worker can be removed from a situation that carries hazards such as stress, overwork, musculoskeletal injuries, by having the AI perform the tasks instead.
•  This can expand the range of affected job sectors beyond traditional automation into white-collar and service sector jobs such as in medicine, finance, and information technology.
•  As an example, call center workers face extensive health and safety risks due to its repetitive and demanding nature and its high rates of micro-surveillance. AI-enabled chatbots lower the need for humans to perform the most basic call center tasks.
• Machine learning used for people analytics to make predictions about worker behavior could be used to improve worker health. For example, sentiment analysis may be used to spot fatigue to prevent overwork.
•  Decision support systems have a similar ability to be used to, for example, prevent industrial disasters or make disaster response more efficient.
•  For manual material handling workers, predictive analytics and artificial intelligence may be used to reduce musculoskeletal injury.
•  Wearable sensors may also enable earlier intervention against exposure to toxic substances, and the large data sets generated could improve workplace health surveillance, risk assessment, and research.
• AI can also be used to make the workplace safety and health workflow more efficient
•  AI‐enabled virtual reality systems may be useful for safety training for hazard recognition.
•  Artificial intelligence may be used to more efficiently detect near misses, which are important in reducing accident rates, but are often underreported.