Digital Safety and Health
We're exploring how digital technologies can be leveraged to enhance health and safety systems.
The Digital Safety and Health platform at the Thomas Ashton Institute is dedicated to advancing AI-enhanced, data-driven, and digital solutions that improve workplace safety, health, and wellbeing. Our vision is to support the UK’s ambitions for digital innovation, regulatory transformation, and net zero by embedding safety into the design and deployment of emerging technologies. We aim to shape the future of work through collaborative research that informs policy, enhances compliance, and protects people in increasingly digital environments.
Scope
This platform explores the intersection of digital innovation and workplace safety, with a focus on:
- AI and data analytics: Developing predictive tools, risk assessment models, and compliance systems powered by artificial intelligence.
- Digital health and wellbeing: Using wearables, ergonomic AI, and digital monitoring to reduce stress, fatigue, and musculoskeletal disorders.
- Emerging technologies: Investigating the safety implications of robotics, IoT, autonomous systems, and cyber-physical technologies in industrial settings.
- Digital regulation and policy: Leveraging big data and real-time monitoring to inform smarter, more responsive regulatory frameworks.
- Net zero and digital risk: Exploring how digital tools can manage safety risks associated with decarbonisation, energy storage, and hydrogen technologies.
Objectives
- Enhance digital safety innovation in regulation:
- Collaborate with key stakeholders exploring digital transformation in the workplace, providing AI and data-driven solutions for workplace safety, health, and wellbeing.
- Explore smart regulatory models, including automated risk detection, safety tech and smart regulation to facilitate innovation.
- Advance AI and digital solutions for workplace safety, health, and wellbeing:
- Conduct research to address current and emerging priority risks using AI and digital solutions.
- Horizon scanning to understand innovations in workplace safety, health, and wellbeing:
- Conduct horizon scanning activity to understand how new technologies are developing and how innovations are being applied in the workplace.
- Cross collaboration with TAI themes and platforms:
- Enhancing innovation and efficiency through strategic cross-collaboration with TAI themes and platforms, fostering a unified approach to high value, strategic research opportunities.
Research platform team
- UoM Lead: Clara Cheung
- HSE Lead: Helen Balmforth
- HSE Strategic Science Adviser: Derek Morgan
- HSE Science Business Partner: Tracy Read
- HSE ERCL lead: Helen Balmforth