ClearObject - Turning Vision AI Into a Wearable

A vision system can see a car enter a work zone in milliseconds. Getting that warning to a worker standing two miles down the highway, wearing a helmet and running a jackhammer, is a completely different problem.

Derek Bleyle, VP of Product at ClearObject, and Tim Hagan, Principal Data Scientist at ClearObject, join host Grant Chapman and guest host Elijah Clarke, hardware engineer at Glassboard, to tell the story of Clear Work Zone, from a design thinking workshop with the New York State Thruway Authority to a production system protecting crews today.

ClearObject spent eight years building software for connected products before this, and the episode is an unusually honest look at what that team had to learn. They started with commercial off the shelf everything, discovered that phones and smartwatches could not deliver the range, battery life, or control they needed, and ran a six week proof of concept that ended with one of their developers soldering a wearable together in a hotel room the night before the demo. That demo was enough to earn buy in from the customer and from their own leadership, which is the real lesson for anyone trying to get a hardware idea moving.

From there the conversation gets into the engineering. Why they alert when a vehicle actually enters the zone rather than trying to predict it, because alert fatigue kills a safety product on day one. Why Wi-Fi HaLow was the only wireless option that could cover a two and a half mile closure with low latency when Bluetooth is too short and cell service does not exist. How they budgeted two and a half seconds from event to a worker getting clear, and drove the end to end system down to four tenths of a second. What it takes to build a device that survives sunlight, dust, rain, vibration, and being thrown in the back of a truck with a helmet on top of it.

Derek and Tim also talk about the shift in mindset that happens when a product moves from convenience to safety critical, the difference between the buyers who run safety organizations and the workers actually wearing the device, and the value of building in the hundreds instead of the thousands so real users can live with a product long enough to tell you what is actually wrong with it.

If you are building a connected hardware product, this is a clear look at the path from idea to something people trust with their lives, and a reminder that the last 20% of the functionality is where 90% of the effort lives.