Amazon to roll out tools to monitor factory workers and machines

Amazon is rolling out cheap new tools that will allow factories everywhere to monitor their workers and machines, as the tech giant looks to boost its presence in the industrial sector. Launched by Amazon's cloud arm AWS, the new machine-learning-based services include hardware to monitor the health of heavy machinery and computer vision capable of detecting whether workers are complying with social distancing. Amazon said it had created a two-inch, low-cost sensor--Monitron--that can be attached to equipment to monitor abnormal vibrations or temperatures and predict future faults. AWS Panorama, meanwhile, is a service that uses computer vision to analyze footage gathered by cameras within facilities, automatically detecting safety and compliance issues such as workers not wearing PPE or vehicles being driven in unauthorized areas. The new services, announced on Tuesday during the company's annual cloud computing conference, represent a step up in the tech giant's efforts to gather and crunch real-world data in areas it currently feels are underserved.