Building safety
Creating new systems that help reduce risk to people in everyday settings
When engineers build smarter monitoring systems, they’re building better environments where people can feel safer.
By creating safer interactions between pedestrians and vehicles and help prevent accidents, engineers have been working to deploy street sensors that detect motions and alert both drivers and pedestrians in danger of colliding. For dangerous industries like mining and construction, they’re developing wearable technology to help monitor environmental conditions and alert wearers if they’re exposed to dangerous levels of heat, radiation, or toxicity. And by creating ski hill monitoring systems that track the movement of skiers and snowboarders, engineers have been able to pull data to identify areas where collisions occur more frequently and help operators prevent them. With improvements to the ways that we monitor and collect safety information, engineers are helping enhance awareness of risk in everyday settings, improve emergency response times and solutions, and provide crucial information to keep more people and spaces safe.
A few examples of how engineers are helping to promote safety and building tomorrows:
Government of Canada funds research in support of avalanche prevention
Sensors to monitor air pollution on UBC campus
AI road technology aims to prevent collisions by tracking vehicle, pedestrian patterns