One year has passed since the Serious Accidents Punishment Act came into force. Born from a social consensus to create "workplaces where workers do not die on the job," the law has over the past year elevated industrial safety to the top priority of corporate management. Yet despite the law's powerful deterrent — criminal punishment — accidents at worksites have not declined easily, prompting a fundamental reexamination of safety management as a paradigm.
What Has the Serious Accidents Punishment Act Changed?
The Serious Accidents Punishment Act, enacted in January 2022, diverges from the existing Occupational Safety and Health Act in a crucial way: when a serious industrial accident occurs, it holds executive managers — not frontline workers — directly accountable. Business owners and executive managers bear the obligation to establish and implement a safety and health management system; if they neglect this duty and a serious accident resulting in death or injury occurs, they face criminal prosecution along with substantial liability for damages.
As a result, companies have begun treating safety not as a "cost" or a "document exercise" but as a management responsibility. Items that were previously handled in a perfunctory manner — risk assessments, safety and health training, regular inspections, gathering worker input, emergency response procedures — have been transformed into obligations that must be "actually carried out and evidenced."
The Limitation That Remains After One Year — The "After-the-Fact Documentation" Wall
Since the law's implementation, many companies have established dedicated safety organizations and organized inspection and training records. But at a substantial number of worksites, point-in-time checklists and training logs are still completed by hand, and the response remains stuck at after-the-fact analysis — determining "what went wrong" only after an accident has already occurred. Knowing in real time "who is currently where, and what hazard they are exposed to right now" remains out of reach.
This blind spot is especially wide at small and mid-sized businesses that lack sufficient safety personnel, and at construction sites where contractor headcounts fluctuate constantly. Most serious accidents — falls, collisions, and entrapments — result from hazard signals accumulating gradually until they reach a tipping point. Records created after the fact make it extremely difficult to interrupt that "building risk" before it explodes.
From "Safety for Compliance" to "Safety for Prevention"
This is precisely the space that industrial safety and healthcare AI platform company SenseZero Co., Ltd. focuses on. The name SenseZero encapsulates the mission of continuously Sensing worksite hazards and reducing industrial accidents toward Zero. SenseZero's starting point is not recording after the accident — it is preventing before the accident.
SenseZero's integrated safety platform collects location, heart rate, activity level, and environmental data in real time from wearables worn by workers and BLE beacons installed at the worksite. This data converges onto a single screen at the integrated control center, while an AI Dynamic Risk Map (DRM) visualizes how risk is accumulating over time. Before hazardous zone entry, falls, prolonged unresponsiveness, or abnormal heart rate reach the critical threshold, warnings are delivered proactively to both managers and workers.
All the Way to Legal Compliance — on a Single Platform
SenseZero goes beyond "prevention" to relieve the burden of "documentation" as well. Safety management activities required by the Serious Accidents Punishment Act and the Occupational Safety and Health Act — risk assessments, pre-work safety briefings (TBM), safety training completion, and alert and corrective action histories — are digitally and automatically recorded, and inspection, training, and response records can be exported as evidence at any time. Labor management covering attendance, labor hours, and payroll, along with worker health management, are integrated into the same platform, linking previously siloed safety, labor, and health data into one.
SenseZero has simultaneously achieved ISO 9001, 14001, and 45001 (quality, environment, and occupational safety and health) certifications, filed multiple patents in the fields of industrial safety, wearables, and AI, and validated its solution's real-world applicability through PoC implementations at actual industrial worksites.
SenseZero CEO Do Yang-su stated: "The most important question the Serious Accidents Punishment Act poses is not 'How do we avoid punishment?' but 'How do we prevent accidents?' SenseZero will continue to demonstrate that answer — not as a documentation tool, but as a platform that reads hazards before they become accidents and protects people."
SenseZero Co., Ltd. develops and operates an integrated industrial safety and healthcare platform specialized in accident prevention, powered by wearables, BLE beacons, and AI.
