Challenges and Opportunities in Occupational Health and Safety Digitalization

The digitalization of the economy and society opens up an unsuspected field of possibilities for the occupational health and safety domain. By digitalization, we should understand not only digital technologies as such, but the uses they allow and their possible uses on individuals, organizations and businesses. Going digital improves the efficiency of the company's operational processes, so we must seek to digitalize to be competitive. The interaction between humans and machines, the resort to Big Data, control and interface tasks, and the resolution of network problems, are now part of the working conditions. The importance of digitalization was even more felt following the “COVID-19” pandemic of 2020. One of the biggest impacts for companies was that employees could no longer go at their place of work, or in a greatly reduced way. This meant that they now had to work online from home and independently, which was made possible thanks to digitalization. The World Health Organization has defined occupational health as being the overall physical/mental and/or social state of well-being of employees taken into consideration by employers, and not just the absence of illness or disability. Safety, on the other hand, is characterized by a work environment fairly protected from certain or potential risks that can injure workers. There is an occupational health and safety risk management process that takes place in three phases. First the workplace hazards are identified. Then, those underlying the risk are defined and assessed. Finally, there are appropriate controls for hazards. Risk management is partially but essentially based on the analysis of several declarative elements which must conduct towards the implementation of improvement/prevention/protection strategies and measures. The multiple origins of the contributing factors make the analysis complex and needs to be structured to be effective. This is a basic reason for which digital technology becomes a valuable supporting tool. Moving to a digital age and integrating digital technology within a company represents a challenge from which advantages can arise, improving the quality of employment and work, or disadvantages that can lead to psychosocial risks. In this evolutionary and dynamic context, the chapter aims to detect and systematize both the current challenges of the world of work, from a safety perspective, and the answers that the acceleration of digitization processes can provide in order to adapt solutions to minimize occupational risks to the new trends that manifests themselves globally.