Enhancing worker safety with heat stress sensing & analytics

Across 32 on and offshore sites, SOL-X was redefining safety in the maritime and OAG industry. Heat level monitoring and alerts are already live on the smartwatch. Dashboards show worker locations and geofences, but not heat exposure. An analytics cloud has been scoped as a platform for safety officers and management, but what it should show was undefined.

Supervisors manage the vessel and everyone on it from the bridge. HSSE officers prevent incidents across the fleet from ashore. For both roles, seeing how heat exposure impacts the crew adds a new lens to work.

Our goal was to help both groups make informed decisions and implement proactive, long-term safety measures.

Understanding working with heat

To understand the challenges faced while working in high heat environments, we had 1-on-1 chats with subject matter experts who had worked in the maritime & OAG sector. We also gathered feedback from users on vessels already using our solution, and observed users at one of the industrial sites that had recently started using it.

Three of these findings, in particular, each shaped a specific part of the solution:

Scroll to see all three →

One connected safety experience

This heat data now needed to serve three different users, each with their specific goals: workers around the vessel or site, a supervisor on watch, and an HSSE officer on shore. All needed something different from the same data.

At the moment workers who work through repeated heat alerts have no safety net until a fall or crew-assist signal fires. We mapped a to-be flow that connects all three roles. A supervisor has visibility of workers with high-heat exposure and gets an early alert of prolonged exposure, while an HSSE officer can review compiled reports to enhance safety training, ventilation and PPE going forward.

Designing inside technical limits

We had to work within certain constraints as we designed for users across the watch, dashboard and analytics cloud.

From the deck to the dashboard

We built storyboards of the to-be solution so stakeholders could see it end to end before it was built.

Scenario: Ben is an engineering officer on board the Helsinki LNG tanker. He's been assigned maintenance work on the deck. Captain Joshua is the officer on watch at the bridge at this time.

From alert to action, across three surfaces

Rethinking high heat alerts on the smartwatch

On the watch, the focus shifted from a high-heat reminder to a hydration reminder. This moves the message from what's happening to guiding the user on what to do next.

Repeated heat alerts were flagged as disruptive by some users, so the system now lets them be muted. A blinking indicator stays on the watch face regardless, remaining visible until heat levels return to an acceptable range.

Escalation flow

If a worker stays in high heat without responding, each reminder gets more urgent and more direct. In very high heat, the reminders come twice as fast. By the third alert, the watch also offers Crew Assist.

Designing the high-heat indicator on the dashboard

It wasn't possible, based on how the map had been built, to link zones directly to heat readings. The challenge was making heat visible enough without overcrowding the map. We designed the "Halo," a visually clean, intuitive representation of ambient hazards around the existing worker and geofence markers, without adding visual noise.

Designing heat stress analytics on the cloud

The analytics dashboard shows an overview and insights of heat stress across all vessels managed by each user. Users can identify and prioritise specific vessel locations and crew rank groups, surfacing trends that support proactive, long-term safety measures.

In a weekly review, an HSSE officer needs to identify which locations are exposing crews to sustained high heat, confirm whether that exposure is ongoing, and know which vessel to follow up with. The walkthrough below follows that review from the fleet overview down to a single vessel, without leaving the page. It's shown with sample data.

Live, at scale

This solution is currently being used on:

Where this could go next

Several enhancements are needed so users can maximise the benefits from these solutions.

What this taught me

This project was about designing three solutions for three distinct personas from the same underlying signal. A worker needed an action-first alert. A supervisor needed situational awareness before sending someone into a hazard. An HSSE officer needed to understand patterns across weeks and vessels.

The "Halo" indicator was particularly challenging to build within constraints. The map couldn't be rebuilt, so the solution had to work with the geofence and worker markers that already existed.

More broadly, this project reinforced why shifting from a reactive to proactive mindset mattered. A system that tells a worker they're overheating is different from one that helps a supervisor prevent it and an HSSE officer plan around it entirely.