Aptima Spinoff Sentinel Named ‘2021 Entrepreneurial Start-Up of the Year’ by Dayton Development Coalition and 2022 Soin Award Winner by Dayton Chamber of Commerce
Venture-backed startup introduced its “Safety as a Service” platform known as SafeGuard® to improve workplace safety through more preventive oversight
Aptima, Inc. announced today that its commercial spinoff company, Sentinel Occupational Safety, has been named 2021 Entrepreneurial Start-Up of the Year by the Dayton Development Coalition and the 2022 Soin Award Winner by the Dayton Chamber of Commerce.
A spinoff of Aptima through the company’s commercialization arm, Aptima Ventures, venture-backed Sentinel introduced its “Safety as a Service” platform known as SafeGuardTM to improve workplace safety through more preventive oversight. Sentinel recently raised a $2.1 million funding round that will be used to further develop its platform for industrial safety and personal health monitoring, and to launch commercial pilots.
Commercializing defense innovation
Funded by Aptima Ventures and the Dayton-based Accelerant Fund, Sentinel was launched in 2020 to commercialize an innovative Confined Space Monitoring System (CSMS) originally developed to improve safety oversight of US Air Force aviation maintenance personnel. The basis of SafeGuard, the CSMS system was developed by Aptima, Inc., Lockheed Martin, and the Air Force, and will improve real-time incident detection and alerting for safer operations. It is also expected to boost Air Force productivity, allowing nearly 80% of personnel previously used in one-to-one worker monitoring to be freed up for other work.
With millions of workers injured and killed annually in hazardous industrial workplace environments, SafeGuard’s unique IoT approach combines sensors, wearables, and AI analytics to intelligently and continuously monitor workers in a variety of dangerous occupational settings. From frontline firefighters and construction workers who face excessive heat, smoke, and pollution on the job, to those working inside dangerous confined spaces in the presence of noxious fumes, chemicals, and other hazards, workers face far greater risk of injury or death when inadequately monitored, working alone or remotely.
How SafeGuard works
SafeGuard fuses a combination of environmental, human, and locational data from a worker’s sensors, analyzing it in the cloud and at the edge to provide real-time detection and alerting. For a mechanic welding inside a ship compartment, for example, algorithms assess their physiological, atmospheric, and other indicators, including heart rate, breathing, air quality, and motion, detecting risks such as dangerous levels of fuel vapors or low oxygen, and their health status.
Unlike current safety protocols that rely on one-to-one observers to check in with confined space workers at intervals, SafeGuard’s cloud-based monitoring enables a single safety manager to oversee the real-time health and safety of 15-20 workers simultaneously, even tracking their precise locations in GPS denied environments.
Predictive alerts and intuitive at-a-glance “green-yellow-red’ status indicators provide continuous, comprehensive monitoring for proactive injury prevention. In the case of high risk or man-down situations, SafeGuard’s built-in decision support capabilities facilitate the appropriate intervention, including emergency or medical response when seconds and minutes are crucial.
To read the full award announcements, please visit https://www.bizjournals.com/dayton/news/2022/02/02/ddc-annual-meeting-and-economic-review.html and https://finance.yahoo.com/news/just-fairborn-safety-innovation-company-141300875.html?guccounter=1.
About Sentinel Occupational Safety
Sentinel Occupational Safety was founded by a passionate team of professionals working to usher in the future of safe and productive work. Born out of America’s Small Business Innovative Research Program and Aptima Ventures, LLC, Sentinel is a leader in the use of industrial IoT for occupational health and safety optimization. Humans have been and always will be more important than hardware. We don’t just believe in this philosophy, we’ve developed an entire system around this premise. Come join us in our quest to personalize safety and provide a safer work environment for all. For more information, visit www.sentinelofsafety.com
About Aptima, Inc.
For more than 25 years, Aptima’s mission has been to improve and optimize performance in mission-critical, technology-intensive settings. Visit www.Aptima.com.
Media Contact:
Joel Greenberg
DCPR
Joel@dcpr.com
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