Five Safety Technology Shifts for Lone Workers in 2026
As digital safety tools become central to occupational health, organizations are rethinking how they protect lone and vulnerable workers through automation, smarter communication, flexible protocols and stronger safety cultures.
2025 was a major year for digital safety. The International Labour Organization presented a major report, recommending that digital tools, artificial intelligence, robotics, wearables, and sensors are now essential and central to modern, effective occupational safety – no longer non-essential and supporting resources. Additionally, government bodies began to address these technologies with proactive legislation such as Senate Bill 53, the Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act (TFAIA), intended to manage the potential major safety risks of mass-wide AI use and reliance.
2026 could potentially be even bigger. It could be more significant for safety, particularly for vulnerable employees and people who work alone – lone workers who are more dispersed across different roles and industries than ever, including utilities, home healthcare, social services, as well as field technicians and engineers. Because lone workers might not have the support of a coworker or easy access to help if they experience an emergency, they rely on these safety technologies more than their accompanied coworkers in order to stay connected. Moving into 2026, vulnerable and remote workers could see five major shifts within their occupational safety that will impact how they use – and view – their daily devices and technologies.
Shift 1 – The end of manual monitoring for vulnerable workers
The first shift – which is already taking place – will be completely away from manual monitoring of workers who are vulnerable and at risk of specific hazards. With so many technological options now available for automated safety monitoring of remote workers, manual strategies are not an effective solution to protect vulnerable people, putting them at serious risk of human error such as missed emergency alerts. It is very difficult to effectively and reliably monitor remote workers without the support of available safety technologies.
Shift 2 – Increased scrutiny around mobile worker violence
In relation to this complete shift to automated monitoring, there will be more organizationally intense focus on the significantly increased risk of violence and harassment from mobile and remote work. The increasing number of people working alone with members of the public or patients in their homes is putting more employees such as home healthcare workers who are at, according to NIOSH, high risk for workplace violence and “primarily work alone in situations that can be dangerous.”
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