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While drones have exhibited considerable potential to revolutionize the construction industry, previous studies across domains have proposed that human-drone interaction could cause adverse impacts on humans (e.g., collision and discomfort). Given that construction has been recognized as a hazardous and high-stress workplace, it deserves deep exploration regarding how newly introduced drones will influence worker well-being during the interaction. However, there is a paucity of research on worker stress when communicating with drones in construction. Successful human-drone interaction must necessitate seamless and comfortable communication between workers and drones. Therefore, this study investigates the impact of physically demanding response levels on construction workers’ mental and physical well-being throughout the communication cycle. Three levels of physical responses (low, medium, and high) required for drone communication were simulated in an extended reality roofing experiment. During the communication process, real-time stress levels were assessed through participants’ electrodermal activity. The results indicated that a higher physical level of communication significantly increased workers’ higher stress levels in both the response and decoding phases. Additionally, providing drones’ feedback in verbal human-drone communication is especially important to reduce workers’ confusion and mental stress. This study highlights the critical need for worker-centric design and communication strategies in drone integration within construction. 

Recent research suggests construction workers fall prey to the cognitive biases of risk compensation, wherein workers offset safety improvements by taking more risks. Parallel previous literature indicates that time pressure and mental load may increase workers’ arousal and stress. However, it is unclear whether time, productivity, and/or cognitive demands can worsen risk compensation behaviors by stimulating workers to make riskier decisions to complete tasks faster. Combining a multi-modal mixed-reality environment with wearable neuro-psychophysiological sensors, this study examines changes in safety and task performance for high-risk electrical-line tasks simulated under time/performance pressure and cognitive demand. The results show risk-compensation is in play as subjects over-rely on safety technologies and maintain their risk perception even while undertaking more risks to adapt to increased time pressure and/or cognitive demand. This paper contributes to body of knowledge by affecting safety-training approaches and the controls needed when providing workers with safety protection and new technological advances. 

Risk propensity, or individuals’ attitude toward risk, can highly impact individuals’ decision-making in high-risk environments since those who merely focus on positive consequences associated with high-risk acts are more likely to engage in risk-taking behaviors. Previous studies identified activation in the prefrontal cortex during decision-making under risk to be a sign of an individual’s attitude toward risks. To investigate whether such past work—prevalent in behavioral research domains—translates into construction safety, this study conducted an experiment in a mixed-reality environment using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) technology to examine whether positive risk attitudes cause individuals to adopt risky construction behaviors and whether the activation of the prefrontal cortex of the brain can represent such risk attitudes. The results show that participants with a higher risk propensity had a higher brain activation during the risky electrical tasks; these individuals merely focused on gains, which motivated them to increase their risk-taking behavior and consequently experience more electrical accidents. Understanding workers’ attitudes toward risk will thus influence future understandings of decision behavior under risk.