Sentinel Alert, the St. John’s company developing worker safety products, spent last week delving into product development in Waterloo Region in a unique form of company retreat.

The week of working with d{} – the Deloitte outpost in the Communitech innovation hub – gave the members of the far-flung company a chance to come together to work on product and business models. With three pilots in progress, the company has amassed a trove of data. Last week, it worked with specialists at d{} (pronounced “dee space”) to find ways to use the data to improve the product.

At the end of the week-long pseudo-hackathon, the company has four prototypes to show to clients.

“It was awesome,” said CEO Sarah Murphy at the end of the week. “Over the last six months, we’ve been  [working on] making sure our product is scalable. This has been our first time [developing a more scalable product] now that we have all this data.”

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Co-founded by Murphy and Jason Janes, Sentinel produces software that can detect when a worker has had an accident or may soon have one. From the outset two years ago, the idea has been that a smartphone can detect when someone has fallen and hit the ground, and the phone should be able to alert the company that an accident has taken place.

Now the application is also being used to detect worker risk – that is, to identify situations in which accidents could occur and or identify processes that could lead to worker injury. Then the worker and company can take steps to fix them. The software is originally being used on devices like smartphones, but the company hopes to eventually partner with a hardware company to produce a wearable device.

Last year, Murphy participated in Communitech’s Women Entrepreneurs’ Bootcamp (now known as Fierce Founders), won the event and walked away with a $35,000 cheque. Then in January, Sentinel Alert announced it had received $535,000 in equity funding from the Venture Newfoundland and Labrador Fund, Killick Capital and several unnamed angel investors.

The company now employs seven people, who are located in St. John’s, Halifax and Ottawa, so the week at Communitech was an opportunity to work together in the same place. Murphy, plans to spend the next few months in her native Halifax and then move to Ontario to be close to clients.

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Sentinel Alert originally targeted the oil and gas industry, but has now decided to focus on the Industrial construction and industrial manufacturing segments. The software can now identify some risks but the company aspires to develop predictive analytics to tell companies what practices could lead to injury. It has been investigating how repetitive motion in industrial work can lead to musculoskeletal injury.  And the company hopes to sell in the near term to major national and multi-national companies.

“What’s next is growing the client base out of the Atlantic region and working on getting much bigger clients, groups with thousands of workers,” said Murphy.