By Nic Patee, Founder & CEO

Benjamin Franklin is famously quoted as saying “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”. A statement that we are painfully understanding around the world today as we wait for a cure for the COVID-19 virus. At Work Right, we are consumed with the mission to put a dent in healthcare. The driving force behind our mission is we believe that it is better to prevent a condition, rather than wait until that condition-or injury-has happened and then fix the issue. This likely sounds obvious to most of us, but the reality is our health system is based on fixing sick and injured people, not prioritizing prevention. When we zero in on musculoskeletal disorders, or those pesky sprain and strain disorders that are typically the result of cumulative trauma over time, prevention strategies are rarely compensated for in our health model. 

This is where Work Right has been obsessive about understanding how to change this. How can we empower people with education, skills, awareness, and even early detection strategies so that they can maintain a healthy lifestyle? We have embarked on a journey to understand, to research, and to continually search for improved methods to achieve these goals. This journey has led us to study exoskeletons, wearable sensor technologies to quantify the physical demands of work, artificial intelligence, natural language processing to identify leading indicators, and research on proper warmup and cool down strategies to improve the capabilities of our industrial athletes. Many of these quests have helped us dramatically improve the capabilities of the workforces we serve and reduce the risk for musculoskeletal injury. 

We have worked with organizations to build and deliver post offer employment testing (POET) assessments to ensure that the workforce is appropriately capable of performing job demands, but this has always left us searching for more. So much of a POET assessment is about the hiring decision. It is rarely utilized to empower the workforce we employ to stay healthy and fit while working. We see this as an opportunity. 

Using computer vision technology, powered by Kinetisense, Work Right is able to analyze the functional capabilities and potential areas of risk in the workforce prior to integrating into the workforce. Unlike POET testing, this capability is not used for hiring decisions. In fact, the employer is blinded from individual assessment outcomes for privacy purposes, but it gives our injury prevention specialists the opportunity to coach on preventative strategies prior to the worker being injured. We are able to use computer vision technology to assess the mobility and stability of the major joints in the body in real time while the worker is completing functional tasks. Using normative data and artificial intelligence, the software can highlight for our Work Right team areas of opportunity where prevention-based coaching would be most relevant.  

Leveraging the Kinetisense technology, among other tools, allows our Work Right Team to use leading indicators to better help keep the workforce we serve healthy and safe. While this is just one example of prevention over treatment, it is an illustration of our commitment to push towards putting a dent in healthcare by prioritizing prevention over treatment.