Reimagining Safety

In any industry, safety is a practical issue which can never be overlooked.

Workers in industrial environments are exposed to numerous hazards, including gas leaks and wet surfaces. These hazards can be mitigated with technology. This is where Blackline Safety’s G7 devices come in. These devices can detect accidents and automatically alert emergency services. Additionally, they record an abundance of information, including GPS readings, gas readings, alerts, and more.

Modern industrial workplaces often face challenges due to lack of information or an inability to make sense of the information they do have. Safety analysis can be limited, with many companies having no easy way to analyze the safety of a workplace as a whole or aggregate company-wide data. 

The sole focus of our design was to make information accessible to users by delivering an industry-quality safety solution. By utilizing the detailed data provided by Blackline Safety's G7 devices, we created a web application which allows users to analyze this data in a customizable, user-friendly way. This allows anyone to be able to personalize the application's visualizations to suit their needs, making safety simple and accessible.

Part of that accessibility also lies within mobile usability. In addition to a fully functional desktop web application, Safetyware also offers a minimalstic mobile-responsive application layout, created using modern React technologies.

See it yourself by visiting safetyware.ca on your desktop or mobile device! By simplifying safety, real world safety issues can be found and solved quickly and efficiently.

Currently, Blackline Safety, the leader in the wearable safety device space, has nothing like our application in terms of interactivity and customizability. Our application is fully accessible and responsive on both mobile and desktop views, and in addition to numerous visualizations, it features a customizable dashboard as well. Most importantly, a company could use our application to assess safety risks in their own workplace, utilizing information analysis to improve workplace safety for everyone.

Our application utilizes modern web technologies such as React state, effects, and custom hooks, as well as state-saving of the dashboard through Redux. In addition to this, our backend has been tested and iterated with a focus on efficiency and effectiveness, creating a lightning-fast user experience on the frontend.

Safetyware has been optimized for full cross-platform functionality and responsive design. Not only does our product provide an efficient and user-friendly experience on desktop, Safetyware also provides the additional ability to perform safety analysis quickly and easily on mobile devices, making safety more accessible than ever before.

Before creating our application, we did careful research and planning, including creation of initial designs in UML, to ensure we chose the most effective technologies and methods we could. Utilizing a modern technology stack including React, Redux, Microsoft Azure, MongoDB, GraphQL, Rust, and Ruby (to name a few) in tandem allowed us to produce a fully functional and connected system that flows end-to-end seamlessly. The synergy of our tech stack helped us to best utilize Blackline Safety's existing APIs and create an industry-grade final product. Through careful research and decision-making we were able to efficiently create a practical solution and publicly deploy our application. We implemented several industry-standard practices including continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD), JSON web tokens for authentication, PBKDF2 for password hashing, all application secrets are stored in a secure key vault, and our frontend follows atomic design principles.

The key focus of our web application was on creating an immersive user experience, with careful attention given to UI/UX design, responsiveness, and usability.

Our user-focused design practices culminated in a final product which allows users to easily navigate through the application and intuitively understand the functionality of all pages. The layout of the application is created in a logical and simple way, and customization and interactivity is intuitive. 

Our application allows users to log in to various user accounts (or a demo account for testing purposes), and lets these users manage their own dashboard, to create a dashboard that is most effective for their needs. Then, the application also allows users to view each individual visualization in more detail on each of their own pages. To add to this, all visualizations are filterable and customizable by date and user as well, and the user can utilize the application on desktop or mobile platforms. With this information, users can effectively analyze the G7's safety data to draw conclusions about hazards in their workplace in order to mitigate these risks. Using our application can create a safer workplace for everyone.

Throughout the design process, we continuously tested our application on both desktop and mobile views, using both emulators of different mobile devices as well as physical devices. This was done to ensure full responsiveness and functionality of the application across different platforms as well as different screen sizes. We implemented unit tests on key API components, and near the end of the project, we also implemented Cypress, an automated end-to-end testing suite, which we used to primarily test authentication as well as main application features.

Throughout the project, we validated our progress against our initial design and ensured that we satisfied our initial requirements. To validate our final design solution, we hosted our application online and allowed our sponsor representative, academic advisor, and course representative to test it on a variety of platforms. We also reached out directly to our sponsor company, Blackline Safety's QA team and had them evaluate our project for quality, usability, and practicality. We received approval from them as well as our sponsor representative directly. In addition to this, our application was reviewed by the Information Security Club at the University of Calgary for security vulnerabilities and passed their inspection.

To ensure the feasibility of our development process, we broke down large project milestones into weekly sprints. Members were assigned tickets using a Jira board to manage work within these sprints. Because of our thorough planning, we were able to meet our primary objectives of all core features as well as all supporting features, and left the project open-ended to allow for future optional feature implementation.

The team followed a rigorous meeting schedule, meeting multiple times per week to ensure the project was kept on track for its entire duration. At each meeting, the team reviewed current sprint goals, progress, and action items for each member. Additionally, we held regular meetings with key project stakeholders, including our sponsor representative from Blackline Safety, as well as our course representative and academic advisor from the University of Calgary. At each meeting, we showcased our progress and process through detailed slides and product demonstration, and received product feedback from these stakeholders at each meeting to enable continuous improvement. 

Overall, our design is highly feasible for companies: it works automatically and is continually updated automatically, and it requires only a web browser. As well, it is extremely cost efficient because the only cost is for Microsoft Azure services. It is also practical because not only is it genuinely useful, it can also integrate with existing monitoring solutions.