Episode 107 – From Wearables to Insurance: How Kinetic is Revolutionizing Workplace Safety

Workplace Injury Prevention Technology: In this episode of Over the Air, host Bill Brock interviews Haytham Elhawary, co-founder and chief strategy officer of Kinetic, who shares the fascinating journey of transforming a wearable tech company into an innovative insurance provider focused on workplace safety. The episode explores how personal experience with his mother’s nursing injuries inspired Haytham to develop IoT devices that help prevent workplace injuries. The conversation delves into the technical evolution of their wearable device, from early prototypes to a sophisticated belt-worn sensor that uses hip movement data to detect risky movements. The discussion also covers their strategic pivot to becoming an insurance company, particularly focusing on workers’ compensation for small to medium-sized businesses and last-mile delivery services. The episode provides valuable insights into hardware development, edge computing challenges, and the intersection of workplace injury prevention technology with insurance services.

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“IoT Podcast: Over the Air” is a podcast that features unfiltered conversations with executives about their IoT journeys — the mistakes they made, the lessons they learned, and what they wished they’d known when they started. In each episode of Over the Air, our expert guests make bold predictions, reveal unpopular opinions, and share stories you won’t hear anywhere else.

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Transcript

Welcome to the Over the Air podcast today.

My name is Bill Brock, CEO of Peridio. And today we have Haytham, co-founder and chief strategy officer of Kinetic. And welcome to the show.

Thanks for coming on. Oh, thanks, Bill, for having me. Excited to be here.

Absolutely. Yeah, we’re excited to have you. And for those of us who are not familiar with Kinetic, could you just give us the 10-second elevator pitch? Yeah, absolutely.

So really, at Kinetic, we have a mission of sort of trying to reduce workplace injuries. And we’ve built a bunch of technologies that can help workers, mostly frontline workers, avoid or prevent getting injured. And so that’s been our focus from the beginning.

And today, that has sort of evolved from selling devices and IoT devices to becoming an insurance company very much focused on prevention of injuries. So what are these very interesting backgrounds? You started in hardware and devices and then migrated to insurance. So what is the hardware? And tell me a little bit about that story.

Yes, I’ll tell you a bit about the story of sort of how it sounds. I’m one of the co-founders, there’s two of us. And really the way it started is, you know, I grew up with my mom, she’s a nurse, and she just got injured a lot.

Funny, sort of fun, not really fun, but the unusual fact is that nursing is actually one of the most injury-prone jobs out there. So it’s one of a very high injury rate. And that’s mostly because nurses are sort of moving patients, they’re moving equipment.

And so with my mom, I saw her get injured a lot. And really, you know, what it made me realize is that when you get injured at work, it doesn’t just affect your work life, it affects your entire personal life too. And so, you know, how you earn money, and the things you can enjoy outside of work and things like that.

So I really had that problem of, hey, you know, there’s a lot of people who just get injured, and it affects their lives. And the approaches to avoid those injuries are still very rudimentary. So we really, you know, I sort of had that in the back of my head when I met my co-founder.

And my co-founder happened to be an electrical engineer who worked at IBM. And he was just very interested in wearables. And 10 years ago now, you know, I don’t actually remember, but Fitbit was going crazy, and first Apple watches were coming out.

And so really what we wanted to do is say, right, could we build some sort of wearable that could help frontline workers who do a lot of manual labor to reduce their injury rates? And that was really how the company started 10 years ago. So very interesting background. Where did hardware come into the mix here? So you did you develop your own wearable? Were you purchasing off the shelf solutions? What did you guys actually do? Yes, I mean, really, you know, we sort of started when we decided, okay, we want to reduce workplace injuries.

You start looking into what are the what are the types of injuries that employers, employees sort of get. And what you realize very quickly is that there’s a couple of elephants in the room, especially with workers who do a lot of manual labor sort of frontline workers. And one of those is sort of musculoskeletal pipe injuries.

So strains, sprains, you hide your back, you hurt an ankle. Those are extremely common. And honestly, like the number of injuries doesn’t really go down.

So it’s one of these things where it’s just sort of they happen on a pretty recurring basis. And there hasn’t been any, I would say, successful real successful strategy bringing these numbers down. So just how it’s out, you know, fatalities have gone down and other types of injuries have gone down.

These ones really haven’t. So we sort of realize, all right, not only are these pretty prevalent, but they’re also very expensive. And so, so that’s when we sort of started out, well, how would we solve those problems? And most of these sort of musculoskeletal injuries happen because people are doing pretty intense physical work, but they’re using their bodies in ways that put them at risk of injury, right? So if you think of you lifting a box up, and you have to lift 500 boxes a day, if you use improper posture or body mechanics, over time, your body is just going to seize up and eventually you’re going to get injured, right? And so really what we wanted to do is say, all right, could we coach workers to use better body mechanics? And if you’re using better posture and body mechanics, you’re less likely to get injured, your body will withstand longer periods of work time.

And so, and so that’s really what we set out. And, and you know, if you think about it, all right, well, how am I going to measure people’s body mechanics at your time and let them know that they’re doing something either properly or improperly? And that’s really where the hardware came in. So we wanted to measure how people were moving and really just give them sort of a gentle nudge, almost like as if they had a coach on them to say, hey, you know, you’ve moved in an improper way.

Why don’t you, you know, pick up that box using your legs? Why don’t you turn your body instead of twisting your body? And so we ended up, well, we ended up, you know, realizing that sensors and hardware was the way to go, because it was the only way to really pick up that information. And we ended up designing, I heard it here in my hand, we ended up designing something that looks a little bit like a pager. And what it does, it goes on your belt.

And so it’s able to sort of measure almost your full body mechanics, just based on the motions of your hip. So that was really where sort of the, a lot of the algorithms and a lot of the innovation came in, not so much the sensors and the hardware, because they’re pretty standard off the shelf components, but it was really, all right, how do we use those to sort of recreate how someone is moving in real time? That’s where we really sank a lot of time in terms of technical development. Yeah.

So what did that, what did that early product development look like? Were you just wearing these things on your belt and doing all sorts of crazy stuff and hitting a button when you were doing something compromised or yeah, what, tell me about this. Something like that. I mean, so, so it was actually pretty interesting, you know, when we started, you know, we, we mostly wanted to measure what, how’s the back moving, right? Because that’s really what, what, what tends to get into the most.

And so we didn’t start off with something on the hip like this. We started off with something that you would strap onto your body. And so I remember very, very clearly, so we would take one of these back braces that you typically see a lot of workers wear, you know, where they, especially when they have to do a lot of manual labor, we would, we would put embed sensors in the back brace, but it turns out that workers actually don’t like wearing back braces that much.

So, so we got rid of that. I don’t even remember GoPros, but do you remember that you could strap them onto your chest? So we took one of those and we took off the GoPro and put our device on and people refer to it as the bra. So we, we knew that that was going to go down well.

And, and then we converted it sort of into a gun belt working device or like, all right, well, maybe, you know, it sort of looks more cooler in a way. And, and what we realized at the end of the day is, you know, strapping something onto people’s bodies just doesn’t work, right? It’s, you know, you get sweaty, like who’s going to clean it? There’s just a whole bunch of things that happen there. And so that’s what we ended up saying, all right, well, let’s put it, see if we can put it on a belt on a, on a waistline.

And, and I just made the whole problem much harder to solve, but it may be a hardware component, much more easily accepted by the workers, right? And so, so the joke Belle I like always to make is, I don’t know if you’re a fan of Shakira or not, but she has a song called, Hips Don’t Lie. It turns out that actually it’s very, it’s very true that, you know, if you can sense the way hips are moving, you can actually infer how most of the body is moving as well. And so that’s really what the premise of the device does.

It says, Hey, we, we put it on your belt and we can, we can sort of infer what your body is doing patiently in real time. Is this why you moved to Columbia and just pursued Shakira? It’s not the reason, but hey, it’s a nice, it’s a nice side of it. I’m saying, I’ve seen some things here.

Yeah. You know, the Daishi responds to my emails of what we’re going to make it. We need, we need, we need some really high quality testing here.

You have very fast moving hips. We’ve all seen it on TV and yeah. Yeah.

So that’s, that’s really, you know, and to answer your question about like early product development as well, you’re right. I mean, what we ended up doing at the beginning is saying, all right, we hire, I remember hiring a warehouse, getting literally hundreds of peoples off Craigslist to do all sorts of tasks in the warehouse. And we would strap them up with centers all over the body and then put this device on there.

And really what we wanted to see is like, what this is measuring is actually close to what they’re actually doing. And what year was this? This was in 2016. Okay.

And so it was a while back. And so, so like, yeah, edge AI was not necessarily really a thing. You guys are probably doing a lot of cloud processing, flagging, tagging, like, you know, you’re absolutely right.

It was, I say it was evolving at that time where there was a lot more happening, much more edge computing. So I remember actually, we got some early sort of sponsorship from Intel who had come up with a chip called the Edison. I don’t even remember that, but basically what they were doing is they had Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, a bunch of like two CPUs on there, you know, great battery management.

So, they’d really just come out with these chips, which was sort of, you know, SOCs that were just really high performance. And so we were able to take advantage of a lot of those innovations to really make as much as possible run on the device. Because really the goal is we, what we ultimately do is we make the device fight rate if it detects that you’re doing a high risk.

And I’m not going to even talk about like what a high risk movement means, but, and so it has to be in real time. So any delay, you know, if Wi-Fi stops working, if you leave the facility because you’re delivering, you know, boxes to people’s houses, we don’t want the ability to respond to a movement to depend on that connectivity. And so we wanted to make everything as much as possible, so work onto the device.

And so we were able to take advantage of a lot of those new chips that were coming out that could really do a lot of the heavy lifting. And what is battery life? What is kind of some of the compute considerations, like where, you know, where are you strong, where are some opportunities? Yeah, I mean, it’s a really good, really good question. So basically this device is a battery.

So it has, that’s really what has been the limiting factor. So, you know, one of the things we realized pretty quickly is initially we spec this out, oh, you know, eight hours has to last a shift. But you realize pretty quickly that in warehouses, in factories where most of these are deployed, like people are working 12 hours, 14 hour over time, like it is a really crazy shift and people are working really hard.

And so yeah, we need a battery that could last, you know, 14 to 15 hours. So yeah, we’ve really had to sort of put a big battery in there, which is what takes up most of the form factor. And so, and you know, could we be more efficient on the chip itself and the algorithms we’re running for sure.

It just hasn’t been a priority. Like we’ve, you know, it’s hard enough to solve everything else. And so we’re like, look, if that’s, if this form factor is acceptable, then we just focused on other as outside of a sort of optimizing the device to be as small as possible or as battery efficient as possible.

And did you always start out with an insurance mindset? Or was it, I know you mentioned like preventing workplace injuries. Was this like the insurance component here? Was this a late stage revelation or were you kind of early on know this is the best way to monetize these technologies and this is how we can get it to market? You know, it’s no, not at all. I mean, you know, I didn’t know anything about insurance when we started the company.

You know, after a while, we were sort of thinking, Hey, this might make sense for insurance company, this type of data, but we never really had insurance at the core of anything that we wanted to do. And, and, you know, I always hoped that like nobody as a child dreams of selling insurance, right? So it wasn’t, it wasn’t like in the back of my mind is like, Hey, what are those dreams I one day want to do? But what we realized pretty quickly is, you know, in the world of sort of worker injuries, there’s, there’s two types of companies, there’s companies that are very big, like say, I don’t know, Pepsi, UPS, DHL, and all these very large companies. What they do is if someone gets injured on their premises doing the job, then they pay for their injuries or the healthcare costs, and they pay for sort of a percentage of the salary while they’re out injured.

So initially, when we started selling this product, we targeted those large companies, right? They call them sort of self insured companies. And we said, look, we’ll sell you these because your injuries are going to go down. And if your injuries go down, you’ll pay less.

So I’d say the return on investment, you know, argument was, was pretty easy to make for those large companies. But then as soon as you go down to small companies, like 100 employees, 150, 200, they just wouldn’t, they were like, look, I’m not going to pay for this, because I, I pay for workers compensation insurance, which costs a lot of money. And so, so they take care of my injuries, right? And so it was very hard to sort of get into those companies.

And so at some point, we realized, you know, the only way to get into a company like that is if we offer them insurance. So we can say, look, we will offer you workers compensation insurance, and we will give you this for free, right? We will help you reduce your claims and your injuries, which will be a benefit to us, because we’re providing you insurance, no, we benefit for you and your employees, because you’re going to have less injuries, right? And so it felt like, hey, this makes a lot of sense from a business perspective. And, you know, workers comp is such an expensive insurance line that there is, there is room in there, if you can reduce injuries to really, to make a bit more margin.

So that was where we realized that this makes sense. So what was that like shifting the mindset from a connected product company? And you’re still a hardware enabled company, but going from selling hardware to selling insurance, was there like huge certifications, or just a total mindset shift, or you had to go get some fancy MBA CFO, actuary person that you’re like, it just it’s a total, it’s foundational change of the business, right? Yeah, no, it really is a foundational shift to the business. And thinking, you know, when we were selling to these large companies, we had just sort of enterprise sales people, you know, knocking on doors, going through a 12 to 15 month sales process to try to sell, you know, big box company A, you know, thousands of these devices.

So even the sales motion we had was just completely different. So about yeah, in 2021, which is when we decided, all right, we are now going to try and get into insurance. And that’s sort of where my insurance journey started.

I didn’t know anything about workers comp other than, you know, had to buy for kinetic. And, and so, yeah, really just thinking about learning what it is, what it covers, how do you sell it. And I think in the insurance industry, the great thing that it has is that it has a structure that allows you to sell insurance on behalf of someone else, right? So the next is, is a, there’s a very easy way to start without having to, you know, have all the regulatory compliance and all the money and the capital you need to become an insurance company.

And we were very lucky that our early investors, one of our early investors was nationwide insurance, insurance corn. And so really, you know, we were able to make that transition because they were early investors, they knew the product well, they knew the impact it could have. And they and they said, like, look, you know, if you want to sell this type of insurance, you can partner with us, you can sell insurance on our behalf.

And you give these away for free. And they were very excited about, you know, seeing if this could get mass adopted across small companies. And, and that was really how we managed to get started.

We actually had another company called Ting. Have you heard of these guys? Hell yeah. And they, they were on the podcast years ago, one of our earliest episodes.

And I got a letter from State Farm, they do my home insurance, and it was like, Hey, sign up for Ting. And I’m like, man, that is really cool to see this, like, because it can be hard to commercialize hardware, for sure. And it’s cool to see these long lasting, like, reduce risk plays, find good monetization models with insurance companies.

It’s very cool. Yeah. And you know, you hit on an interesting point there, right? There’s really two ways you can approach the insurance side.

One is to partner with a State Farm and then, you know, say, Hey, look, can you can you distribute this to your customers? And, you know, when we started, we thought that that would be the way, right? We could try to sell into in large insurance companies. And, and what we realized is, is that, you know, the sale cycle is very slow. So, so large insurance companies, you know, really what we realized is that insurance companies are great at investing the money they get to premiums, but they’re not necessarily like innovative technology companies, right? There’s very few of those.

And so, so it’s just very hard to get the right people in place to get them to really buy into the technology. And so I think it’s happening a little bit in personalized insurance, like, for example, home insurance, or some telematics in like your car and things like that. But it hasn’t really happened very much on the on the is like insuring businesses to zone.

So that’s why you realize, all right, if we’re going to include this as part of insurance and really focus on prevention, we have to offer the insurance ourselves. Very cool. What’s what’s like next for you from the product perspective is the is the bomb pretty much at a stable place.

And you guys feel feel good about the product? Are you looking to develop other hardware applications? What’s on the product side? What are you looking for? Yeah, it’s a good question. You know, we’re very passionate about the product itself, the hardware and the software. But really, you know, what we realized as well is that we’ve we’ve making it like the devices really had an impact on reducing musculoskeletal injury.

So what typically happens is the device, you know, vibrates and tells you, hey, you’re doing this high risk movement. And so when someone starts worrying it, they might have hundreds of these a day. And then you start to see that over time, that starts to go down.

And and as the number of these high risk movements goes down, injury rates start to go down as well. And and so we’ve got a lot of success of driving down injury rates, which is really, you know, for us is very, very exciting. And, you know, but as you start ensuring these companies, what you realize is that musculoskeletal injuries, while it’s usually the one of the biggest injury types and the most expensive, it isn’t their only type.

So for example, we, we, we ensure a lot of parcel delivery companies. So if you see my person, you know, drops off packages at your home that you’ve bought over e-commerce and things like that, the number of times we see dog bites or slips and falls, especially with, you know, ice involved and things like that is incredible. And so more, you know, what we decided to do is to say, look, we can’t just really focus on musculoskeletal injuries only, because that’s just not the entire set of losses that or the entire set of injuries that these companies have.

We’ve got to sort of create a platform where we can, you know, use lots of different technologies to address each one of these different types of injury types. And sometimes we’ll develop them and sometimes we’ll sort of bring a technology that already exists, if it’s, if it makes sense. And really, we want to be sort of that platform that offers this sort of menu of items, depending on the type of injuries you have.

And so that’s really where we’re going towards. So we will continue to sort of build hardware devices as needed. And but we’re doing a lot with, for example, computer vision, because Yeah, I saw that on the website was what’s happening there.

Yeah, so, so there’s really two, two types of products. One is that, you know, lots of these facilities, especially manufacturing warehousing, they have cameras already in their locations. So we can use those cameras sort of overlay, you know, machine learning algorithms and things to really extract what are your main drivers of risk here? Is it? Look, you’ve had like this up, you have 40 forklift pedestrian crossings that are too close, eventually, that something’s bad is going to happen.

So we can we can identify things like that. But I would say that, you know, not every company is ready to have a third party plug into their, their camera feeds and really analyze operations, not just because of like big brother concerns, but also just because a lot of people consider their operations as proprietary. This is my source is how I do stuff.

And I’m just going to hand it over to you. So the other thing that we’re also doing is, we’ve just released an app where people can take pictures in their facility and literally in seconds, our algorithms can look at those pictures and say, Hey, these are your main risks. Here’s how you how you solve them.

And so, so really, that’s the direction we’re going into is, is having this platform of technologies that allow us to identify what’s going to potentially cause your injuries and then give you solutions before things get worse. That’s really very cool. Um, is your primary customer segment, where are you seeing the most traction? I would say on the insurance side, it’s definitely these possible deliveries.

So anyone that does last mile delivery is actually really well suited to a device because either somebody else may risky as watching a woman deliver for Amazon in our neighborhood, we’re like in the downtown, we’re at a nice, great lover neighborhood, nothing wrong with it. But also like, it’s still 11 o’clock at night on a Friday, and we lived kind of close to downtown. And there’s like a 25 year old woman delivering like big boxes by herself, like after dark.

And I’m like, this could be sketchy. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

So, um, yeah, so, so, um, from a safety perspective as well, you know, you’re out, you’re out there, right? So there’s dogs can attack you, you can, you can trip on something, you can get into a car accident. So just lots of things can happen. And so, um, that’s when, you know, our device is very well suited to that, because it looks at, you know, these strain, it’s brain injuries, we read the tech jumps as well, running and things like that.

So we can really identify some of the movements that tend to be, you know, a precursor of an injury. And so that’s the, so there’s, I would say the biggest, the other two big areas are warehousing. So actually, you know, inside the facilities, we have yet thousands of devices and sort of pretty, pretty large warehouses.

And the other one is manufacturing. So we have a lot of presence in manufacturing as well. And so yeah, I would say those are probably the three main industries.

I’m picturing a feature and it’s like, no bad idea time. But the, you know, when you’re driving and they’re like, is the car is the cops still there with the, you know, is it still a radar hotspot? It’s like, is the dog still there? So it’s the angry dog still on 14th street. And you, you can’t say that you can’t imagine just how it is rare that you would look at all the claims of a parcel delivery company and then they not have, don’t buy it literally every year.

It is incredible. All these, so my wife used to work for Lyft and she was internal communications. And I won’t say much more than that, because I know we were probably NDA’d as a family, but like all the things that you encounter from these like peer to peer marketplaces and how much risk those companies are taking on by allowing drivers, like you cannot do something more risky than driving somebody across town.

But like, you don’t think about this, you’re like, I just, I got my package. It was great. But like the people that are doing this are just putting themselves in such that they’re so exposed, they’re on the yield, we’re on our sofa.

It’s just, you know, there’s a lot of chance encounters. So I get it. So it’s a big deal.

Yeah, exactly. You know, and in that sense, like, you know, when COVID happened, something very interesting, you know, I think for those of us who are like on the sofa, right, we sort of became much more aware of that type of work, right, you know, where the grocery stores weren’t filled. And, you know, we started calling a lot of these frontline workers and essential workers.

And so they just became this realization that sort of, you know, our economy and lifestyle gets sustained by a lot of workers who are just going around, you know, delivering things, making manufacturing goods. So I think in that sense, it very much helped that cause because people just became so much more aware of like, you know, this demographic, this population and some of the issues they have. Very cool.

Very interesting. Thank you for the deep dive. I want to switch gears directly back to Colombia.

So what took you down there? Hi, like, what’s the what’s the appeal? Like, have you been to Colombia before you got family or what’s yeah, why are you down there? Yeah, so, you know, we started in Connecticut, New York. Company was built there. We have our main office there.

And really, just a couple years after about eight years doing kinetic, my wife got transferred to Colombia for her work for her job. And I was thinking, you know, does it make sense for us to do this or not? And, you know, I’d been working from home for a little while and going into the office most weeks, but I was maybe I can get away with doing this remote work from Colombia. I’d moved here and it wasn’t the intention, but one of the side benefits has been, you know, we’ve hired two people based in Bogota.

We’re part of now the engineering as a data team. And I want to say I want to expand like there, you know, lots of very educated, smart folks here. And yeah, so we’re excited to sort of grow out that team as well.

Awesome. Well, very good show. Really enjoyed having me on.

Like what’s like when you’re looking to the future, like what’s next for you guys? Yeah, you know, I think right now we have both businesses where we sell, you know, technology to these large companies and we also, you know, sell insurance. I think we’ll, like our insurance side of the business has just grown like crazy because, you know, essentially you’re selling a product that people have to buy. Right.

Which is this work has got insurance. So, you know, I think we’ll, we’ll continue to go down that path. And really that that’s the idea.

The idea is, all right, let’s just figure out how we can prevent all these different types of injuries that we see in these industries and, you know, build our products or incorporate products that can solve them. So we’re very excited about that because there’s just very few insurance companies that think about prevention. And when you approach, you know, the policy holders of the companies who buy the insurance, you know, as busy as they are and there’s multiple hats they will have to wear, they are very interested and excited to adopt technology like this that will help their workforce stay productive, injury free.

These are folks who know their workers really well, they’re in their facility, they’re speaking to them every day, and so they really care for them. And so, you know, we’re finding just great reception to this type of stuff. So I never thought I would tell her, you know, as I dropped that bell that I, that I, you know, we’re going to build the best workers’ cover insurance company, but I think we’re going to build the best workers’ cover insurance company and really, you know, really stop people from getting injured as much as they did today.

Well, it takes some time to find your place in the world and we don’t always know where we’re headed, you know, when we’re like 13 years old. The product market fit is non-trivial and I’m really excited to hear that you guys have found a great application for what is obviously a very unique and compelling technology. So hats off to you.

Thanks, Mill. Yeah. Well, with that, we can wrap for today.

Thanks for coming on the show and we’ll look forward to having you back six, 12 months and hear how it’s going there.

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