According to Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) estimates, nearly 35,000 forklift accidents result in serious injury each year in the U.S., including an average of more than 85 fatalities. Litum has been developing real-time tracking technologies to improve worker safety since 2004. While many companies in the space rely on computer vision to help forklifts avoid collisions, Litum’s system, which provides physical tags for warehouse pedestrians as well as vehicles, uses ultra-wideband high-frequency radio technology and mesh networking that gives operators 360-degree situational awareness, enabling them to detect other vehicles around corners or identify a worker crouched behind a pallet.
In September 2023, the company released an enhanced tagging system so sensitive that forklifts can detect a tag even when it’s submerged in fluid inside a steel drum, eliminating the problem of signals being blocked by a worker’s body. One of the world’s largest retailers reports having achieved near-zero forklift accidents after deploying the system, and last year the company experienced a 50% surge in inbound leads for the product.
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