Say the words “health and safety” and many people roll their eyes. It conjures images of policy documents collecting dust on a shelf, training that focuses on the consequences, rather than causes of incidents and safety “solutions” that are inefficient and distract from the task at hand.
We believe the way organisations manage, organise and protect people at work is fundamentally changing to become more collaborative, efficiency-driven and predictive rather than reactive. Most importantly, it’s about putting the end-user at the heart of any strategy or solution. The next generation of safety solutions should empower the individual to engage with a safety-first mindset at work by providing the tools to escalate emergencies, report incidents, and predict what risks are most likely to arise in the future.
Our team – with more than 25 years of combined experience in the lone & vulnerable worker safety industry has witnessed how difficult it is for organisations to manage the growing number of safety and compliance responsibilities. The knowledge about incidents, near misses and risks are usually spread across many silos, difficult to access, keep up-to-date and action.
Most solutions are outdated, complex, slow, or lead to even more problems. We saw that there had been little to no innovation in the past ten years when it comes to tools for at-risk workers and the people responsible for them. However, there are new enabling technologies such as Estimote, Seeed and Twilio that inspired us to build something better.
Simplicity: Onboard users in minutes using our intuitive web application, set your company-specific incident escalation procedures, and you are ready to go.
Safer: As a British Standards (BS8484:2016) certified supplier, you can be sure that your people are in safe hands. We have highly experienced alarm monitoring operators and provide the most reliable and robust personal alarm devices on the market.
Integrated: Protector™ is three applications in one. Company managers, end-users and our alarm monitoring operators all have a different view of the same data. Detailed and timestamped incident reports are available to end-users and company managers instantly so you will never miss a thing.
Beyond emergencies: Not every incident requires an immediate emergency response; it should, however, be recorded. Protector™ is becoming an essential part of any organisation that wants to understand more about its risk workplace risk factors.
Integrations: We want to expand upon how we currently integrate with our customer’s other core systems. An API and ready-made extensions will help increase the value of Protector™ and prevent silos of knowledge.
Intelligence: Artificial intelligence provides many opportunities to augment and automate incident monitoring, response and predictions about what risk factors our customers should focus on. Examples include enhanced search, natural language processing of voice notes, and automatically surfacing related or relevant contextual information when reporting on incidents.
One-stop-shop: Protector™ is our first product; we see tremendous value in augmenting the experience our customers have using Protector™ by offering adjacent solutions to other workforce management and workplace safety challenges.
My interest in positioning and telematics technologies started when I undertook a postgraduate research project designing and implementing positioning systems for handheld and wearable devices. Initially, my idea was to work with elderly people and care homes, but I realised there are very similar challenges in the lone worker protection space. In 2018, I was fortunate to assemble a very talented engineering team, and we set to work on building Protector™, which we are confident will become the pre-eminent solution in the lone worker protection industry. In June 2019, we launched our first international market, Australia, where we protect people in some of the most extreme environments on earth.
Prior to founding Vatix, I worked in the software and cybersecurity team at Strategy&, part of the PwC network; and hold degrees from Bristol University, Imperial College London and Exeter University.
– Mark Newton, CEO
