Workplace injury prevention is becoming more measurable. That sounds obvious until you look at how many risks are still assessed through observation, incident history and generalized assumptions about what a job involves. A group of current Canadian safety initiatives is pushing in another direction by bringing research tools into the places where work actually happens. WorkSafe Saskatchewan and the Saskatchewan Workers’ Compensation Board launched a five year mobile research lab in September with the Canadian Institute for Safety, Wellness and Performance. The unit can travel to workplaces and use wearable technology, sensors, observation tools and environmental monitoring equipment to measure physical demands, fatigue, posture, movement, vibration, cognitive workload, physiological strain, noise, temperature and other exposures. The initial focus is construction, transportation and health care. Those sectors are different enough to make the broader point. The value of field research is not that every job should be reduced to a dashboard. It is that some hazards are difficult to understand from a policy document or a single walk through because they emerge from the way work is performed over time.
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