Axora develops unique health and safety app

Axora’s Head of Product, Ally Gale and Gaurav Gupta, Head of Client Delivery and Management at digital delivery partner AND Digital discuss the benefits of the app’s use for heavy industry.

This unique technology allows companies to save money and efficiently recognise any health risks with their employees. Axora developed this bespoke solution based on a challenge presented to us by a client.

This solution was also developed in partnership with Vastmindz.

Q. Why did you decide to develop XR HealthPass?

Ally Gale: Working alongside industry partners gives us a unique insight into the everyday challenges and issues at mine sites, and it started to become clear that there was a problem here we could solve. We knew the technologies needed to test workers for alcohol and high temperatures already existed. However, no one had ever brought them together into a single, easy-to-access place.

By adding new technology to capture the added health data – stress, blood pressure and so on – we knew we’d have an all-encompassing solution which massively improved current processes at a relatively low-cost price point.

Q. What health and safety concerns does XR HealthPass aim to solve?

Gaurav Gupta: It enables companies to screen their employees before entering high-risk, hard-to-reach, hazardous environments like mining sites. Dangerously high blood pressure, inebriation or intense stress levels, fevers, and more can be checked and responded to quickly from a controlled space. The app uses Vastmindz’s clever AI technology and integrated industry-recognised health monitors to provide immediate feedback on less-tested data.

Q. What happens if companies don't address health and safety challenges?

Ally: While workplace illness and accidents need addressing in any profession, prevention in mining and heavy industry is paramount. Operating heavy vehicles and dangerous machinery - often in challenging environments – means the risks are far higher.

On a human level, this involves extreme risks to employee safety, and on a business level, it can be vast sums lost due to operational shutdown. Using traditional paper-based manual testing is cumbersome, slow and open to error – our app removes these issues with quick digital capture, immediate results and automated data storage where required.

Q. How can companies best tackle health and safety challenges?

Ally: They can do this by being a step ahead, which XR HealthPass allows them to do. Companies will benefit from having on-the-spot results for temperature or alcohol levels. However, it's the availability of other data points and long-term trends relating to stress levels and other health indicators that organisations can use to plan for and prevent illness and accidents.

Q. What benefits does XR HealthPass bring to organisations? Can it be expanded to other industries?

Ally: By offering a single, user-friendly application, which provides a customisable and fully digital solution, companies can speed up and enhance the process of employee health scanning.

XR HealthPass removes the need for slower manual testing with automatic data logging, both securely and anonymously. While primarily aimed at mines or similar heavy industrial environments, it is a solution that is transferrable to any industry where rapid testing would be beneficial.

Gaurav: It also increases safety for workers while reducing company liability.

XR HealthPass has an extensive application for any higher-risk industrial space. However, this application goes beyond this to include some consumer spaces, such as airport check-ins, and construction sites, but not limited to these. It can easily be customised to consumer needs and extended to include further checks or skip checks relevant to other industries.

Q. What was the process of developing the technology, and were there any roadblocks? 

Gaurav: Our first intention was to prove the app could work. It uses Bluetooth and API integrations to pull in the various data readings. We needed to understand how well these could work together, and creating a minimum marketable product with four unique integrations was a challenge.

Good prioritisation by the team mitigated this, and with hard work and persistence with third parties, we arrived at a reliable app that we could safely iterate on.

Once we had the outline of the app functionality working, we could build around it and then put in place ways to build and distribute the app anytime there is a new feature. It meant anyone in the team or beyond could quickly test and provide feedback during development.

For the rest of the development window, this gave us a strong sense of where the project was heading and what features to prioritise with the small amount of time the project had for development. We’re pleased with the result and are excited to see it evolve.

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