When a machine hurts someone, the only record belongs to the company that built it.
WARD is a recorder the operator installs. It witnesses what a machine did, seals each reading into a hash chain nobody can quietly edit, and can stop the machine. Below is ninety seconds from a night shift, exactly as WARD recorded it.
A person enters the corridor 3.4 m ahead of the machine. Machine continues — 312 W, normal.
Distance closes to 95 cm. Proximity rule fires. Threshold 100 cm, set by the operator.
Contact. 97.4 dB.
Brush head stalls at 690.2 W against a 320 W baseline — 116% over.
The machine uploads 78.4 MB to its manufacturer. Twenty-five seconds after impact. No human has been told yet.
Duty console cuts power. Machine held out of service.
This incident is invented — no one was hurt and Orbitec Robotics does not exist. Everything else is real: the 384 readings were posted to the live ingest API, the alerts were decided by the rules engine against this site’s own thresholds, and the chain was computed by the same code a customer would run. A demonstration you cannot check is a slide. Check this one below.
The gap this sits in
A cleaning contractor, a hospital, a warehouse — whoever runs the machine carries the liability when it injures someone or damages a building. But the telemetry that would say what actually happened sits with the manufacturer, in a format the operator has never seen, disclosed at the manufacturer’s discretion and on their timetable.
So the operator’s insurer is asked to settle a claim on the word of the party with the clearest reason to shape the answer. That is not a technology problem. It is an evidence problem, and it is the one WARD solves.
EU Data Act (Reg. 2023/2854) Art. 3(1) — connected products placed on the market from this date must make the data they generate directly accessible to the user. In force since yesterday.
Revised Product Liability Directive (EU) 2024/2853, transposition deadline. A court may presume a product defective where proof is excessively difficult because of technical complexity — and the defendant rebuts it with evidence. 87 days from now.
Reg. 2023/1230 replaces the Machinery Directive, with explicit duties around autonomous and self-evolving behaviour, and a technical file to back them. 129 days from now.
None of these requires anyone to buy WARD. What they do is make “we asked the manufacturer and they said the robot was idle” a much worse answer than it was last year — and, from December, put the party who cannot produce a record on the wrong side of a presumption. These are Directives, so the national implementing law is what binds; check your own jurisdiction before relying on a date.
Three jobs, one box on the machine
Independent witness
Power draw, motion, human proximity, acoustics and network traffic, hashed into an append-only chain as they arrive. Each entry commits to the one before it, so removing or editing any past reading breaks every hash after it. The box carries its own backup cell, so it keeps recording after the machine loses power — which is exactly the minute anyone will later ask about.
Auxiliary stop
Rules run on every reading as it lands. A triggered rule can alert the operator or open the machine’s own external e-stop loop, letting its safety system perform a proper stop rather than dropping power mid-motion. Fail-safe: the relay is energised while power is allowed, so a dead box opens the contact.
Legal channel
The portal tracks Data Act requests to the manufacturer and records refusals. The evidence pack bundles the readings, the chain proof and the clause mapping into one document for an insurer, a regulator, or the other side’s lawyer.
WARD is an independent witness with an auxiliary stop — not a certified safety device. Marketing the stop as a safety function means ISO 13849 performance levels, and that claim is not made here.
Do not take the record on trust
The incident above exports as a 13-page evidence pack. Every reading in it is bound to the chain by a hash you can recompute yourself, with a ninety-line script that reads only the file and Node’s crypto — no database, no network, no WARD code.
$ node verify-pack.mjs ward-sample-evidence-pack.json robot : Scrubber-04 window : 2026-08-14T22:00:00Z → 2026-09-01T15:26:11Z chain entries checked : 384 events bound to chain : 384/384 root hash : 71808a7d1e581cd56818fb12c49bc838… PASS — the record is internally consistent and every event is committed to the chain. $ node verify-pack.mjs ward-sample-evidence-pack.json --tamper events.0.watts=999 events bound to chain : 383/384 FAIL — coverage: 1 of 384 events is not committed to the chain
Editing a reading and editing the hash that covers it fail in different ways, so neither can be repaired without exposing the other. That property is the product; the sensors are just how readings get in.
What exists today, and what does not
Pre-revenue, built and running. The list below is the whole truth of it.
| Piece | State | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Portal — multi-tenant, rules, alerts, per-tenant hash chain, audit | LIVE | ward.global-soft.ro |
| Evidence pack, PDF and JSON, filed against clause packs | LIVE | Machinery Reg. Annex III, CRA Annex I, Data Act Ch. II |
| Independent verifier | LIVE | Ships with every pack |
| Sensor node → portal, authenticated per device | LIVE | ESP32 / ESP8266 firmware, device-bound keys |
| Stop loop, portal to physical relay | LIVE | Proven on the bench: deny → contact opens in ~3 s |
| Enclosure, M12 robot interface, backup cell | NOT BUILT | Designed, not fabricated |
| CE marking, ISO 13849 rating | NOT DONE | Deliberate — witness first, safety function later |
| Deployment on a customer’s machine | NONE YET | This page is how that changes |
The pilot
Sixty days on your machines, on a written question: when something goes wrong, does an independent record change what happens next — with your insurer, your client, or your machine’s supplier? At the end you keep the evidence packs whether or not you continue.
Worth a conversation if you operate cleaning, delivery or logistics robots and carry the liability for them; if you integrate or rent out machines and get asked what happened; or if you underwrite this equipment and price a risk you currently cannot observe.