By 2050, the City of Helsinki aims to achieve its ‘Vision Zero’ strategy—eliminating all traffic-related fatalities and serious accidents. To reach this goal, the city is pro-actively exploring innovative safety solutions. In collaboration with Buddywise and Ramudden, the City of Helsinki recently conducted a 16 week project at a construction site managed by Ramudden, using Buddywise’s AI-powered cameras to improve worksite safety.
The Urban Challenge
Construction sites in busy urban environments pose significant risks to pedestrians, particularly at crossings where vehicles and foot traffic intersect. Near-miss incidents often go unnoticed, leaving city planners with limited access to the data needed to make informed safety decisions and improvements. The City of Helsinki Helsinki sought a solution to increase visibility into these risks and take proactive measures to protect pedestrians.
AI-Powered Safety Solution
Ramudden deployed Buddywise’s AI-powered cameras at pedestrian crossings along a major construction site on Mannerheimintie, one of Helsinki’s busiest streets. The software continuously monitored interactions between pedestrians and vehicles, using an advanced near-hit detection model to identify high-risk situations. Whenever a vehicle came dangerously close to a pedestrian, the AI flagged the incident for further analysis.
Key Findings
The project provided measurable, data-driven insights and detected for example:
- Frequent high-risk near misses — many of which would have gone undetected without real-time monitoring. See the illustrative pictures below of real near misses.
- Patterns of risky behavior — such as drivers failing to yield to pedestrians at certain crossings.
- Actionable, data-backed insights — used to optimize crossing design and improve traffic management strategies.
Illustrative examples of real scenarios captured during the project
Customer quote
“As a result of the project, we can conclude that the use of AI-powered cameras not only enabled us to determine the number of near-miss incidents but also allowed us to see deeper into the root causes of these issues. The monitoring revealed different types of problems and facilitated the consideration of further corrective actions.”
Samuli Sorjonen
Product Manager Digital at Ramudden
What’s Next?
By making previously unseen risks visible, the Buddywise Safety Technology enables real-time detection of risks, providing data to make improvements in pedestrian crossings, traffic flow adjustments, and overall safety measures—not just for this site but for future projects as well.
Through data-driven safety enhancements, the City of Helsinki is taking meaningful steps toward a safer urban environment. By leveraging AI and collaboration, we are moving closer to a future with fewer near-hits and accidents, ultimately ensuring that pedestrians and construction workers can coexist safely in a rapidly growing cityscape.
About Buddywise
Buddywise is a Stockholm and Berlin based computer vision company, transforming workplace safety with computer vision powered AI that provides real-time risk detection and data driven prevention of workplace accidents. With our platform, safety leaders of industrial sites collect unique real time data that generates insights and learning resources, alerts and GDPR compliant reports, enabling proactive prevention of accidents and efficient protection of frontline workers.
For safety in infrastructure, we offer relevant risk scenarios such as digital inspection, allowing you to see if site signage is missing, has fallen down or become twisted, and traffic flow, which tracks, counts, and shows directional movement of people and vehicles.
Imagining the impact of these insights at your sites?
Let's talk