With over 20 years of experience at the intersection of incident prevention and technology, Barry Nelson and his teams have helped hundreds of companies, including Fortune 100s and startups, to utilize emerging technologies, organizational science, and machine learning to significantly reduce accidents and injuries in the workplace. As a thought leader and researcher, Barry is actively working with industry leaders on the opportunity to use workplace conversations, combined with computational linguistics and natural language processing, to identify early indicators of unplanned, potential catastrophic events in the workplace. He has been researching leading safety indicators for two decades, across dozens of organizations and tens of millions of field observations and daily planning conversations.
Barry founded Predictive Solutions in October 2001 and, as President and CEO, he pioneered the use of mobile devices and enterprise data analysis in the safety industry. He and his team worked closely with leaders in Machine Learning at Carnegie Mellon to build the first reliable safety incident prediction models in the workplace. Barry sold Predictive Solutions to Industrial Scientific in 2008 and continues to work closely with industry leaders on change initiatives, risk management, and human performance in the workplace.
Currently, he serves as the founder and CEO of FactorLab, the provider of the popular and rapidly growing safety leading indicator application SmartTagIt, which has been used by field professionals across dozens of enterprises over two million times in the last 2.5 years.
For our latest Faces of EHS profile, we sat down with Barry to discuss supporting the EHS professional, the rapidly approaching changes in safety technology, and the importance of showing, not telling, when it comes to valuing safety. Tune in to hear his insights.