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 heat alerts were already live on the smartwatch. A supervisor dashboard already existed, showing worker locations, tasks, and geofences, but not heat. An analytics cloud had already been scoped as somewhere decision-makers needed to look, but what it needed to show them wasn't defined.

A supervisor already manages the vessel and everyone on it, from the bridge. An HSSE officer already works to prevent incidents across the fleet, from ashore. Visibility into heat risk needed to fit inside what they were each already responsible for.

Our goal was to help both groups make informed decisions and implement proactive, long-term safety measures. Reacting to alerts after the fact wasn't enough.

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

The same heat data now had to serve three very different people, each with their own goals and frustrations. A worker on deck, a supervisor on site, and an HSSE officer on shore all needed something different from it. Click through each to see their goals and frustrations.

Today, a worker who keeps working through repeated heat alerts has no safety net until a fall or crew-assist signal fires. We mapped a to-be flow that connects all three roles instead. A supervisor can see a worker is in a high-heat area 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 real technical limits

As we designed for users across the watch, dashboard and analytics cloud, we had to work within some real constraints.

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 what the user needs to prioritise when they receive a heat alert.

We also removed repeated heat alerts to reduce notification fatigue. To maintain visibility, a "Stay Hydrated, Stay Safe" message was added to the watch face, remaining until the heat level returned to acceptable levels.

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.

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 really about designing three different views onto the same underlying signal, without losing what made each one useful. A worker needed a calmer, action-first alert. A supervisor needed situational awareness before sending someone into a hazard. An HSSE officer needed patterns across weeks and vessels, not individual moments. Getting all three right meant the constraints (upload cost, data privacy, map limitations) weren't obstacles to design around. They were part of the brief.

The "Halo" indicator was a good example of that. We couldn't rebuild the map, so the solution had to work with the geofence and worker markers that already existed. Starting from what the system could actually do, and letting the visuals follow from that, mattered more to the final design than any single screen decision did.

More broadly, seeing this scale to 32 vessels and 800 smartwatches worn by real seafarers reinforced why the reactive-to-proactive shift mattered. A system that only tells a worker they're overheating is very different from one that helps a supervisor prevent it and an HSSE officer design it out entirely.