When the UAE first restricted working hours on construction sites in the summer of 2007, the number of accidents halved. But the industry could soon have another weapon to help labourers – technology.
British data science consultancy, Profusion, which opened a UAE branch six months ago, sees a big future here for technologies that can do things such as track people’s activity levels and log employees’ or customers’ movements.
“In construction, obviously you have large volumes of workforce all over the site – so you could be tracking them to make sure things are running efficiently,” says Julia Boullemier, the regional director of Profusion, which interprets data.
“And if that was linked to some wearable technology as well, you could track people’s heartbeats and we could also, particularly in construction in the UAE, where dehydration levels are a key issue, [track that] as well. Once you have all those other data sets, we can look at time of day, location and things like that.” However, data collected by wearables and beacons are also useful to companies in a wide number of industries including retail, finance, government and telecommunications.
To prove the point, Profusion recently conducted a study using the Fitbit wearable technology device among its own employees. A total of 31 employees wore the bracelets, which track activity, 24 hours a day as part of the trial, which involved 171 different data sets, such as height, marital status, stress levels and quality of sleep.
The firm is now expanding the trial by adding beacons in strategic locations such as meeting rooms, kitchens, near the toilets and printers to give Profusion the opportunity to assess its employees’ stress levels in specific situations and see how they engage with each other.
It is all part of a developing workplace trend, which uses technology to improve employee well-being, in addition to areas such as increasing efficiency and the bottom line. Xerox has just launched a new HR solution, Xerox Life Connect Portal, available through any device, which allows employees to access information such as their personal records and eligible health benefits.
“Expectations for workforce technology have changed, both in terms of what an employer can affordably deliver as well as what an employee may expect based on other applications and tools commonly used in daily life,” says John Deacon, the principal and head of corporate solutions at Buck Consultants, a Xerox company.
Q&A
Profusion’s regional director Julia Boullemier speaks about what data science is and how it aims to help companies in the UAE:
What does Profusion do?
We are a data science consultancy, so the teams we have are the consultancy piece and a team of data scientists. We are using data sets in various different industries like retail, banking and finance. It can go into construction, telco and a lot of different government organisations, particularly here. The data sets can be geography, location related, transactional [or from] wearable technology.
What is data science?
It is kind of a combination between data analytics and mathematics. It’s quite a unique skill set. Data science is a specialist industry, particularly in this region. It is new. Data science can be used in marketing. It is good to understand what kind of return on investment you are getting. It is also really good for operations to make sure a business is being run efficiently. There are vast data sets, so we can use the information to understand what is interesting and what is going to solve problems for a business.
What sort of clients do you have here?
We are at the start of our journey in the region but we have a global client here. The government is very interested in making sense of data – if we can use these insights to make it a [more efficient] city or state.
How do you collect the data?
It is the organisations who collect the data. We help them make sense of the information.
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