NEWS9 June 2022
SETsquared Surrey member Mafic was pleased to be a part of the recent Project Hack 15 held at Tottenham Hotspur stadium. Mafic uses wearable devices in construction to allow the blue collar workforce to collect their own data and demonstrate their capabilities so they can receive a fairer wage based on the work they actually do rather than what senior management ‘think’ they do.
Project Hack was founded by Martin Paver at Project Success who specialise in enabling organisations to extract insights from the rich seam of data created during the delivery of construction projects. As both project and data experts they look to exploit the latest advancements in data science to increase delivery confidence and predict issues before they arise. Project Success is looking to provide thought leadership to transform an entire industry. In December 2017 they founded the project data analytics community which has since grown to thousands. They also founded Project Hack a community project data based hackathon to inspire a community.
Project Hack 15 is the fifteenth event and involved 15 challenges, around 300 participants and two days of rapid building and learning. As an added incentive there was a 5k prize for the winner.
During one of the challenges participants used Mafic hardhats, and built a Machine Learning model which can identify people from the way they walk alone. Mafic hats are used by tradespeople to demonstrate their own performance and receive a bonus if they hit their targets. Ensuring that the right person is wearing the hat assigned to them is really important and so at Mafic we wanted to develop a biometric system which can automatically detect when the hat is being worn by someone other than the owner, just using the subtle difference in the way people walk.
This challenge included designing the experiment, collecting the data, building the model and then testing and validating. This was all completed in just two days. The second challenge looked at aliment detection and alerted users if they developed an asymmetric gait. This is useful in combating presenteeism on the construction site. People understand they have a problem but often need a nudge to go and see a doctor or change habits.
For Mafic, these events offer a range of different exciting opportunities. It exposes the company to a huge cohort of technically savvy construction individuals from young graduates through to C-level executives. Ensuring Mafic can have access to the best people is paramount in building a high performing construction tech company. These events also get out data into the hands of the people who can benefit the most. Allowing the construction industry to understand exactly what is possible today is really important.
Will Woodhead, CEO of Mafic comments, “Challenge 8 of project Hack 15 did some amazing work. It’s great to be a part of this data-based community. At Mafic we have realised that a single company cannot extract all the value from our data alone and so our mission is to get it into as many hands as possible to maximise the return to the industry.”