Abstract
Current construction hazard identification mostly relies on safety managers’ ability to identify hazards using their prior knowledge about them. Consequently, numerous latent hazards remain unidentified, which poses significant risks to construction workers. To advance current hazard identification capabilities, this study examines the feasibility of harnessing and analyzing collective patterns of workers’ bodily responses (balance, gait, etc.) to identify safety hazards on a jobsite. To test the hypothesis that the abnormality of workers’ bodily responses in one location highly correlates with the likelihood of a safety hazard in that location, this project collected data on the bodily responses of 10 subjects who participated in five experiments. These test subjects wore inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensors on their body. Then the collected response data were analyzed using three metrics [average, standard deviation, and Shapiro-Wilk statistic ()]. The data showed that the normality of workers’ bodily response distributions—represented as a statistic—highly correlated with hazard locations in every experiment, which implies that workers’ bodily responses in hazardous areas are more irregularly distributed than in nonhazardous areas. This outcome demonstrates an opportunity for utilizing workers’ collective bodily responses to identify safety hazards in diverse construction environments.
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Acknowledgments
This study was partially supported by Nebraska Research Initiatives and the National Science Foundation (CMMI #1538029). Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Nebraska Research Initiatives and the National Science Foundation.
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Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
Volume 143 • Issue 2 • February 2017
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© 2016 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Mar 3, 2016
Accepted: Jun 27, 2016
Published online: Aug 8, 2016
Discussion open until: Jan 8, 2017
Published in print: Feb 1, 2017
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