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The training effect can be enhanced when trainees/learners interact with real-world environments and construct personal knowledge from those direct experiences. Leveraging such experiential learning strategies for occupational training has been widely discussed due to its effectiveness. The construction industry has also been focusing on experiential safety training to address the limitations in conventional classroom-based training, such as passive learning and limited interaction with actual physical hazards. Recently, government organizations and construction companies have started to operate safety training facilities, where trainees can physically experience the negative consequences of unsafe behaviors (without actual injuries). Although the effect of experiential safety training at those facilities has been anecdotally noted, no study has empirically investigated its effectiveness in enhancing trainees’ risk perception toward unsafe behaviors. To this end, this study examined the effectiveness of experiential safety training in enhancing construction managers’ risk perception toward workers’ unsafe behaviors and their intention to stop workers from working in dangerous situations. The results, based on answers to survey questions showing scene images of unsafe behavior related to the risk of a fall, show that construction managers who participated in experiential safety training perceived a higher risk regarding workers’ unsafe behaviors in less obviously risky situations, and exhibited a stronger intention to immediately stop workers from working in subtly unsafe conditions. This study contributes empirical evidence about the effectiveness of experiential safety training at safety training centers, thereby promoting the wide adoption of experiential safety training and advancing safety engineering and management strategies in the construction industry. 

Abstract Biosignals from wearable sensors have shown great potential for capturing environmental distress that pedestrians experience from negative stimuli (e.g., abandoned houses, poorly maintained sidewalks, graffiti, and so forth). This physiological monitoring approach in an ambulatory setting can mitigate the subjectivity and reliability concerns of traditional self-reported surveys and field audits. However, to date, most prior work has been conducted in a controlled setting and there has been little investigation into utilizing biosignals captured in real-life settings. This research examines the usability of biosignals (electrodermal activity, gait patterns, and heart rate) acquired from real-life settings to capture the environmental distress experienced by pedestrians. We collected and analyzed geocoded biosignals and self-reported stimuli information in real-life settings. Data was analyzed using spatial methods with statistical and machine learning models. Results show that the machine learning algorithm predicted location-based collective distress of pedestrians with 80% accuracy, showing statistical associations between biosignals and the self-reported stimuli. This method is expected to advance our ability to sense and react to not only built environmental issues but also urban dynamics and emergent events, which together will open valuable new opportunities to integrate human biological and physiological data streams into future built environments and/or walkability assessment applications. 

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.