Manual safety patrols on Singapore building projects miss too much and create heavy admin. This 2025 guide shows how AI video analytics on existing CCTV (Invigilo SafeKey) can monitor high-risk zones continuously, push real-time alerts, and cut routine patrol hours while keeping oversight audit-ready and PDPA-aligned.
How AI video analytics on existing CCTV can reduce routine patrols and strengthen safety oversight on building projects.
Construction work in Singapore remains one of the highest-risk activities to manage. The Ministry of Manpower’s Workplace Safety and Health Report shows that construction is consistently among the top sectors for workplace fatalities and major injuries. At the same time, projects are taller, more complex and packed with overlapping trades.
If you are responsible for safety on building projects, you probably feel the limits of manual safety patrols. Supervisors walk long routes, see only snapshots of work and then spend hours writing or consolidating notes. When an incident happens, someone has to scrub through hours of CCTV to reconstruct what went wrong.
This guide explains how you can reduce manual safety patrols on building projects by using AI video analytics on existing CCTV with Invigilo SafeKey, while still strengthening oversight and governance.
On most projects, safety oversight still relies on fixed or semi fixed patrols. Supervisors walk the site at set intervals to check PPE, barricades, access control and work at height platforms. They may capture photos, update checklists and later compile observations into daily or weekly reports.
This model was designed for smaller, simpler job sites. In modern high rise and mixed use developments, it is increasingly difficult for patrols to keep up with the pace and spread of work across multiple towers, podiums and basements.
Manual patrols have three obvious limitations:
In Singapore and globally, regulators and clients are paying more attention to proactive controls and evidence. The International Labour Organisation estimates that nearly 3 million people die each year from work-related causes worldwide. In this context, depending mainly on where supervisors can walk and what they happen to see is no longer enough.
Most building projects already deploy CCTV for security and basic monitoring. Inviglo SafeKey is designed to integrate with existing CCTV and IP camera networks. It connects directly to current cameras and can also work with compatible cameras installed later to cover blind spots.
Once integrated, Invigilo SafeKey runs AI models on the live video feeds. These models are calibrated to detect more than 50 safety risks in real-time, so you get continuous monitoring of high-risk zones without replacing your entire camera stack.
Once integrated, Invigilo SafeKey runs AI models on live video feeds from selected views. You choose the highest risk zones. For example repeated open floors, hoist landings, crane lifting areas and work at height platforms, and SafeKey monitors those zones continuously without replacing your entire camera stack.
From those views, SafeKey detects the conditions supervisors typically walk to check, including:
Detection alone does not change behaviour. Supervisors need to see alerts quickly and in channels they already use. Invigilo SafeKey sends real time notifications to WhatsApp, Microsoft Teams and SMS, while also updating a central dashboard. A supervisor on level 10, for example, can receive an alert that a worker on level 16 is working at the slab edge without a harness, or that a red zone around the crane pad has been entered.
This lets you shift from long, routine patrols to event driven supervision. Patrols still happen, but they are shorter, more targeted and supported by evidence from alerts and video clips.
If you want to get a feel for where AI alerts would help most, book a demo of Invigilo SafeKey and walk through one project’s highest risk zones and camera coverage with the team so you can shortlist two or three hazards to monitor continuously.
Once AI monitoring is running, the challenge is no longer “can we see events” but “can we see the bigger picture”.
Invigilo SafeKey provides a dashboard with:
Instead of reading scattered patrol notes, you can see, for example, that most line-of-fire exposures occur near a particular crane pad late in the afternoon, or that one subcontractor’s crews generate a disproportionate number of PPE alerts.
Invigilo’s analytics content for factories illustrates how these dashboards can support weekly reviews, trend tracking and better planning. The same principles apply when you use Invigilo SafeKey on building projects, with zones and labels tailored to tower cranes, open floors and façade works.
When something serious happens, manual CCTV review can consume days. AI-assisted video review changes that process.
Instead of scrubbing through footage camera by camera, you can run large blocks of video through an AI layer that automatically highlights key safety events, flags anomalies and timestamps incidents. You then review a shortlist of relevant clips instead of watching hours of continuous footage.
For patrol reduction, this matters because you no longer depend solely on what was written in notebooks at the time of the incident. You have an objective, video based view of what actually happened on the affected levels and decks. This makes it easier to understand patterns and refine how you deploy supervisors.
If you currently spend a lot of time piecing together incident timelines from raw CCTV, it may be worth booking a demo to see how Invigilo’s AI-powered video review can streamline investigations and free up supervisor time.
Before you reduce patrols, you need a clear picture of where you stand. For each project, you can map three things on a simple site plan:
This mapping shows where cameras already cover areas that patrols repeatedly visit, and where gaps still require physical presence. It gives you a basis for deciding where AI can take over some observations and where patrols remain essential.
Based on Invigilo SafeKey’s confirmed detection set, good candidates for AI assisted checks in camera covered areas on building projects include:
A cautious approach is to let AI and patrols run in parallel for a defined period. You can then compare what Invigilo SafeKey detects against what patrols see, and gradually adjust patrol frequency where AI coverage is reliable. In zones without cameras, manual patrols remain the primary control.
A 30 to 60-day pilot on one project gives you evidence without committing to a full rollout.
You can choose two or three zones where:
For these zones, you can track metrics such as:
The aim is to understand how AI affects both safety visibility and supervisor workload, not to hit a particular percentage. If the pilot shows that AI is catching relevant events and helping supervisors refocus their time, you can start reusing the configuration on similar buildings.
Invigilo SafeKey’s design supports centralised dashboards and multi site monitoring, so you can compare performance across projects, standardise metrics and refine your patrol model over time.
Any camera-based monitoring of people must respect privacy laws and company policy. Invigilo’s construction PPE guide highlights PDPA-aligned governance as a core design principle. Invigilo SafeKey supports role-based access, configurable viewing permissions and data retention settings so that deployments can match internal rules.
In practice, you should clearly document:
This written governance helps with both PDPA compliance and worker trust, especially when it is shared with contractors and unions.
AI does not remove the need for safety professionals. It automates the detection, counting and surfacing of risks. Humans still decide which actions to take, how to communicate and how to shape safety culture.
Supervisors verify alerts and context, safety committees interpret trends and leaders decide how to invest effort. AI gives them better information, but it does not make the decisions.
Reducing manual safety patrols on building projects is not about walking away from the site. It is about letting AI watch high risk zones continuously through existing CCTV so that supervisors can focus on the parts of safety work that require judgement and conversation.
In this guide, you have seen how:
If this is a direction you want to explore, a practical next step is to review one active building project, map patrol routes and camera coverage, and identify a small set of zones where Invigilo SafeKey could add the most value.
To discuss how AI video analytics on existing CCTV can help you reduce manual safety patrols on your building projects while maintaining strong safety oversight, you can contact Invigilo through the product page or book a demo of Invigilo SafeKey. This will let you see live detections, dashboards and investigation tools that match the realities of your own sites.
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