Veea and SK E&C Collaborate to Create Smart Edge Construction Safety Management System

Wednesday, October 21, 2020

NEW YORK, Oct. 21, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Veea Inc., a pioneer in smart edge connectivity and computing, announced that the Company entered into a joint development agreement with SK E&C for a construction safety management system based on the Veea Edge Platform. Construction sites are high risk places with many activities involving heavy construction equipment and earth moving vehicles, scaffoldings, excavations, electrical power lines that pose risks of bodily injuries, and even loss of life to construction workers. The Smart Safety Platform combines edge computing, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) technologies and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to deliver a comprehensive safety management system, providing real-time risk and safety information to site operators and safety managers.

The dynamic nature of construction sites makes it nearly impossible to use wired internet connectivity. VeeaHub^TM Smart Edge Nodes, a key element of the Smart Safety Platform, offer wireless and wired mesh networking, IoT and SD-WAN connectivity, including 4G LTE, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, and LoRaWAN, making deployment and re-deployment in these environments very simple. All VeeaHub models also include an edge server and computational resources to run applications in a secure virtualized environment with integrated cybersecurity protection and IoT gateway functions, providing for cost-effective, easily deployed network elements that create a computing and communications mesh with unparalleled scalability, flexibility and operational simplicity.

The Veea Edge Platform can most efficiently address the considerable demand for consuming and interacting with data-in-motion, including from live streaming data, in a highly secure manner for a wide range of applications such as Internet of Things (IoT), computer vision, Machine Learning (ML), cognitive computing with AI, Augmented Reality (AR), cybersecurity, micro-transaction processing, wearable communications and other technologies that are now driving a massive shift away from solely relying on cloud computing to a hybrid model with edge computing.

Veea Inc. was co-founded by Allen Salmasi in 2014. Mr. Salmasi has a long history of working with Korean companies. While he was President of the Wireless Communications Division of Qualcomm, he led the Company’s efforts in its development and introduction of CDMA technology worldwide. During the 1990s, he established a close collaboration between Qualcomm, the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), and Korean service providers and equipment manufacturers who supplied CDMA-based cellular products to both Korean and global markets.

Headquartered in New York City, Veea maintains engineering offices in Iselin, New Jersey (USA) and Bath (UK) with certain of its engineering, sales and support executives and staff located in San Diego, Boston, Miami, Seoul, Paris and Annecy, France.

The Veea Edge Platform, which extends Cloud services to the edge, provides for Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) with highly differentiated Multi-WAN Secure Access Service Edge (MW-SASE) nodes capable of running a wide range of hybrid edge-cloud applications for offering managed services in many vertical markets such as Smart Cities, Smart Buildings, Smart Energy, Smart Construction, Smart Healthcare, Smart Farming, Smart Retail and many others at the edge. VeeaHubs are also Microsoft Azure Certified for IoT, ensuring customers get IoT solutions up and running quickly through a fully integrated hardware and software platform that has been pre-tested and verified to work with Microsoft Azure IoT services.

Ahn Jae-hyun, CEO of SK E&C, said, “We have been working with our corporate organization to practice better safety management, which is a core value of corporate management, and to promote digital tools to help prevent accidents. This agreement with Veea will help to establish a stronger and smarter safety platform to prevent onsite accidents.”

“SK E&C’s Smart Safety Platform initiative is a perfect application for the Veea Edge Platform,” said Allen Salmasi, CEO of Veea Inc. “We are thrilled to be working with the SK E&C team in creating a platform which we expect will be well recognized as the pinnacle of safety management system technology”.

Smart systems in the construction domain must serve the edge use cases with a high degree of dependability that is reasonably trusted to improve safety and business-critical operations. Measures of system dependability include high Quality of Service (QoS), fault-tolerance with self-healing and self-organizing capabilities, portability, multi-WAN and LAN connectivity, cybersecurity, maintainability, system integrity, and especially operational safety in a wide range of harsh construction environments. The Veea Edge Platform addresses these requirements within a single architecture.

With the Veea Edge Platform, safety procedures at Smart Construction sites can be realized at much lower costs with significantly higher safety standards to prevent human injury, property damage or other disasters. To improve the safety performance and automate the safety processes at construction sites, real-time monitoring of construction assets and resources can now be supported by applications running on VeeaHubs with ultra-low latency while minimizing the risk of mission critical monitoring and operations being affected as a result of loss of connectivity to cloud services.

Integrating a real-time monitoring and early warning system at the network edge can increase the construction site safety, prevent disasters, and save lives. A monitoring and early warning system running in containerized applications on the Veea Edge Platform is capable of collecting enormous amounts of sensory data in real-time, using ML and AI technologies to pre-process the data, and then responding to events rapidly through the early warning and event notification services. It can also generate warnings in case of natural disasters, i.e. floods, earthquakes and similar natural disasters, to save lives.

One of the critical applications supported on VeeaHubs is AI-enhanced computer vision that provides for real-time processing to capture, interpret and analyze video streams and time-lapse images to provide for actionable insights that can detect anomalies, track progress and identify safety and security risks. For example, a tower crane safety supervision system with integrated sensors in combination with the computer vision application can effectively prevent many accident scenarios such as load instability or crane operations in high winds. Such a solution can also prevent failure of temporary structures or worn-out bridges and historical structures through real-time monitoring with vibration sensors and AI-supported cameras to minimize risks of death, bodily injuries or project downtime.

The Veea Edge Platform also supports Augmented Reality (AR) most efficiently and instantaneously at no bandwidth cost for content delivery to the edge devices (e.g., tablets or smartphones) to improve teamwork and project collaboration while preventing delays and mistakes at the construction sites.

About Veea, Inc.
Veea is redefining and simplifying highly secure edge computing while improving application responsiveness, decreasing bandwidth costs, and reducing central cloud dependency. VeeaHub Smart Edge Nodes integrate connectivity, processing power, and security to form an elastic, dynamic meshed edge computing platform that can easily be deployed and managed at the edge with cloud-based network and device management. Veea’s Edge Services run across this application mesh to deliver secure remote access, IoT/IIoT/AIoT, and a wide range of smart applications. Veea is now serving the needs of a large number of enterprise and public customers ranging from SASE Work From Home (WFH), Smart Schools and distance learning, Smart Buildings, Smart Energy, Smart Cities, Smart Construction, Smart Farming, to Smart Retail. For more information, visit www.veea.com. Follow on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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About SK E&C
SK Engineering and Construction (SK E&C) is a leading subsidiary of the SK group of companies based in Seoul, Korea. SK E&C is a leading EPCC (Engineering, Procurement, Construction and Commissioning) company with excellent engineering and construction capabilities proven over time in various industries, such as power plants, civil infrastructure, architecture, and housing.

As a major player in high-tech engineering for the 21st century, SK E&C is committed to becoming a top-tier global engineering and construction company. SK E&C is currently carrying out significant size projects in the U.S, Saudi Arabia, China, Thailand, Vietnam, India, Ecuador, Qatar, Algeria, Venezuela and CIS. This outstanding achievement is the culmination of SK E&C’s extensive project experience, superior technology, and talents.