Integrating drones into construction sites can introduce new risks to workers who already work in hazardous environments. Consequently, several recent studies have investigated the safety challenges and solutions associated with this technology integration in construction. However, there is a knowledge gap about effectively communicating such safety challenges to construction professionals and students who may work alongside drones on job sites. In this study, a 360-degree virtual reality (VR) environment was created as a training platform to communicate the safety challenges of worker-drone interactions on construction jobsites. This pilot study assesses the learning effectiveness and user experience of the developed 360 VR worker-drone safety training, which provides an immersive device-agnostic learning experience. The result indicates that such 360 VR learning material could significantly increase the safety knowledge of users while delivering an acceptable user experience in most of its assessment criteria. The outcomes of this study will serve as a valuable resource for improving future worker-drone safety training materials.
more »
« less
Enhancing Workers’ Vigilance to Electrical Hazards through a Virtually Simulated Accident
Electrocution is one of the major causes of fatalities in the construction industry. Despite periodic safety training aimed at retaining workers’ vigilance (i.e., sustained attention) to electrical hazards, workers tend to fail to maintain vigilance toward frequent encounters with electrical hazards. Providing an effective intervention that restores workers’ vigilance is thus critical to reducing electrocution accidents. To this end, this study proposes a Virtual Reality (VR) safety training environment that exposes workers to repeated electrical hazards and simulates an electrocution accident when workers come in contact with the hazards. A pilot experiment was conducted, and participants’ vigilance (i.e., eye fixations on the hazard) was measured using eye-tracking sensors. The results reveal the potential effect of experiencing VR-simulated electrocution on enhancing workers’ vigilance to electrical hazards. The outcomes of this study will lay the foundation for further studies to employ VR as a safety training environment that allows workers to experience a simulated electrocution, thereby contributing to a potential reduction in fatal electrocutions.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2017019
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10524449
- Publisher / Repository:
- American Society of Civil Engineers
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 9780784483985
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 651 to 659
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Arlington, Virginia
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Given the dynamic and complex nature of the construction industry, maintaining situation awareness at job sites is critical. To react properly, workers must identify dynamic safety hazards within the scene. The majority of studies assessing construction workers’ situation awareness have utilized static images, virtual reality, and other types of simulation methods, but questions remain as to whether these formats are able to capture and monitor workers’ naturalistic behaviors and hazard identification abilities. To identify whether the format of hazardous stimuli (i.e., static, image-based vs. dynamic, and video-based formats) impact workers’ subjective and objective hazard identification and situation awareness metrics, this study developed 23 safety hazard scenarios utilizing state-of-the-art augmented 360° panoramas and then tracked differences in workers’ visual search patterns and hazard identification abilities using eye-tracking technology. The workers’ cognitive responses, evidenced by their eye movements, showed that workers had significantly varied cognitive processes and abilities depending on the format of stimuli: Workers with lower hazard identification skills were more likely to miss hazards in a dynamic environment. This result suggests that the experimental setting should be carefully designed to determine construction workers’ natural cognitive process.more » « less
-
Safety training has long been considered a promising method to enhance workers’ hazard identification skills within construction sites. To improve the effectiveness of safety training, such varied features as a training environment, individuals’ learning ability, and lesson personalization have been investigated. However, as records show workers still miss hazards even after receiving safety training, understanding the fundamental cognitive reasons for unrecognized hazards becomes a crucial step toward developing effective personalized safety training. This study used various 360° panoramas of construction scenarios to empirically examine 30 workers’ visual search strategies and assess workers’ hazard identification skills. Results suggest several cognitive limitations caused failures in hazard recognition, including attentional failure, inattentional blindness, and low perceived risk. Based on these findings, this study proposes a personalized safety training framework to address such cognitive limitations to improve occupational safety in the construction industrymore » « less
-
Temporary traffic control (TTC) in highway work zones has significant implications and challenges in terms of safety for road users and workers. Work zone workers are increasingly concerned about the risks they face due to their proximity to live traffic on the road. Drivers tend to be less aware of the risks faced by workers in highway work zones. The public should develop empathy to increase awareness about the danger construction workers are exposed in highway work zones. The research objective was to use virtual reality (VR) with a role-playing situation with almost complete sensory immersion in a controlled environment and a driving simulator to investigate if exposing drivers to the work hazards that highway construction workers typically encounter influences their behaviour while driving through work zones. The study compared the driving behaviours in the simulator between subjects sensitized using VR to the subjects who were not sensitized using VR. The simulation included the use of a GPS device that instructed drivers to turn on a road that was blocked by the TTC of the work zone as a distraction strategy. The results indicate that participants exposed to VR made safer driving decisions than participants without the VR intervention. The results suggest that drivers' empathy towards highway construction workers in a work zone can positively impact safety, communication, and well-being.more » « less
-
One of the main contributors to the human errors that lead to catastrophic injuries in the construction workplace is the failure to identify hazards as a result of poor attention or cognitive lapses. To address this safety concern, the present study used eye-tracking technology to assess how the association between work experience and hazard identification may be mediated due to inattention. A mediation analysis was conducted and tested using a bias-corrected bootstrapping technique with 5000 resamples. The results estimate the direct and indirect effects of work experience on the hazard identification skills of construction workers observing varying hazardous conditions. The results of the mediation analysis confirm that inattention—demonstrated via inattentiveness toward hazards—mediates the relationship between work experience and hazard identification. Specifically, though work experience and dwell time positively correlate with hazard identification, the direct effect of work experience on hazard identification is attenuated with the inclusion of the mediator variables in the model, thus suggesting attentional impairment offsets the benefits of work experience. The outcomes of this study will enable researchers and safety practitioners to harness real-time eye-movement patterns to identify the precursors of cognitive failure, deficient attentional allocation, and poor visual search strategies, all of which may put workers at risk on construction sites. The results also facilitate the provision of personalized safety feedback to workers and the design of training interventions that will address unique performance deficiencies in workers to prevent the human errors that cause injuries in dynamic environments.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1061/9780784483985.066
