Building a better safety vest

The neon safety vest is a staple in warehouse docks and yards around the globe, but its garish color isn’t always enough to protect truck drivers from injury.

When Swedish entrepreneur Jonas Svanholm saw the statistics on accident rates for truck drivers, he decided to try to build a better safety vest—one that would be smarter and more helpful in hazardous situations but wouldn’t add tasks for its wearers to perform.

In 2020, he launched Swanholm Technology AB, a company that develops connected safety products for “exposed” professionals. In November, the company introduced its first product, the Alert Vest. The new smartphone-connected garment includes fall-detection sensors and a Bluetooth-enabled accelerometer attached at the nape of the neck. When the fall-detection alarm is triggered, the vest sends an alert to the user’s emergency contacts.

To test the design, a team of engineers dressed a 155-pound crash-test dummy in a smart vest and put the unfortunate mannequin through a series of falls and tumbles. In testing, the vest was able to detect a wide variety of accidents, such as falls from the driver’s seat, tumbles off the back of a vehicle, and simple slips and falls on the ground, according to the company. 

The connected vest is also equipped with a pushbutton switch on the front to send an alert should an operator become stuck, wedged, or otherwise pinned somewhere and unable to make a phone call. Company engineers even designed a way to avoid “false positive” alarms by including a 30-second grace period after each fall is detected. During that time, a vest wearer who was merely jolted but not injured can cancel the alarm with the push of a button.