Potential Impact & Current Use for Incident Prevention

By Chukwuma Nnaji, Ifeanyi Okpala and Ibukun Awolusi AACCORDING TO BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS (BLS, 2020), the construction industry witnessed a period of steady reduction in the number of fatalities and overall incident rate between 1973 and 2010. This reduction was primarily achieved through the introduction of new safety regulations, optimizing safety processes using lagging indicators (Marks, Teizer & Hinze, 2014), and introducing other effective safety practices (Hallowell & Gambatese, 2009). However, recent statistics indicate that the reduction in the number of fatalities has at best flattened over the past several years (CPWR, 2018). Increased construction complexity, escalating job pressure and the aging construction population are plausible antecedents for the observed stagnation. Moreover, Esmaeili and Hallowell (2012) posit that a primary reason for the observed deceleration is the lack of infusion of new safety innovation into construction operations. A study conducted by McGraw Hill Construction (2013) indicated that 43% of contractors do not intend to introduce a new safety innovation (technology or practice). Given that the industry has reached saturation with respect to traditional incident prevention strategies, researchers have suggested that reducing the number of fatalities in construction will require an increased application of emerging safety technologies across a project’s life cycle (Hollnagel, 2014). Studies have shown that technologies such as building information modeling (Zhang, Sulankivi, Kiviniemi, et al., 2015) drones (Şerban, Rus, Vele, et al., 2016), wearable sensing devices (WSDs; Awolusi, Marks & Hallowell, 2018; Cavuoto & Megahed, 2018), virtual reality (Gheisari & Esmaeili, 2019) and exoskeletons (Cho, Kim, Ma, et al., 2018) have the potential to improve construction worker safety. Of these technologies, WSDs such as proximity sensing devices have been extensively covered in safety research (Awolusi, et al., 2018; Marks & Teizer, 2013). However, there is some hesitancy toward integrating WSDs into construction operations. According to Dodge Data and Analytics (2017), only 13% of contractors use WSDs on projects. Reasons such as the cost of the technologies, privacy, lack of performance-based information and interoperability have been identified as concerns that limit the application of WSDs on construction projects (Awolusi, et al., 2018). Although the information available on the potential impacts of these technologies is important, no study has investigated the direct causal effect of using WSDs on safety performance. This lack of information could be associated with the time required to empirically evaluate the exact contribution of technology on worker safety and the difficulty in isolating the impact of a single control element. Without information on the impact of WSDs on worker safety, insights on how WSDs could prevent incidents that lead to severe injuries or fatalities could help improve construction stakeholders’ perception of WSD utility. This study aims to investigate the impact of WSDs as a control measure by showing how WSD features could have prevented fatalities using archival data. Also, the present study investigates the perception of top management toward the use of WSDs. It is expected that the information provided in this article will first inform organizations of the intriguing potential of WSDs in construction applications and provide manufacturers with information that could enhance the development of future WSDs.