Yes, camera-based AI can recognise a person holding or looking at a mobile phone in a monitored area and flag it as a distraction event, both for pedestrians crossing forklift routes and for operators on a truck. Detection works only within camera view and is less reliable at distance, in poor light or when the phone is partly hidden, so it supports a phone policy rather than enforcing it alone. The events are most useful in aggregate: they show which crossings, aisles or shifts have the most phone use, so supervisors can move crossings, add phone-free zones or target coaching.
The full guide is Forklift distracted driving: cell phone policies that hold up. NIOSH treats phone use as a recognised cause of distracted driving, and the same attention problem applies to people on foot in forklift traffic.
Before deploying, decide who sees the alerts, whether individuals are identified or images are blurred, and how the data is used in discipline, and tell employees what is monitored. Forklift AI camera privacy covers those choices. Phone detection is an administrative control, ranked below separation and engineering controls in the hierarchy of controls.