United States Department of Transportation
i
Increasing Work Zone Safety: Worker Behavioral Analysis With Integration of Wearable Sensors and Virtual Reality
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2020-05-01
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[PDF-1.33 MB]
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Abstract:With the development of wearable technologies, an increasing number of research studies have been exploring the feasibility of using wearable sensors to send alarms to construction workers. The advancement of virtual reality (VR) enabled researchers to simulate potentially dangerous situations (e.g., speeding vehicles) in work zones without putting workers in harm. Therefore, the combination of VR and wearable sensors provides an opportunity for researchers to study the optimal configuration for sending notifications to workers. This research first identified the key factors of a work zone that can influence the possibility of incidents as: work zone location, work duration and work type. Next, three work zone scenarios that are more likely to result in work zone incidents were identified based on a thorough literature review and screening of past news stories regarding worker injuries at work zones. Three scenarios based on real incidents were identified as more likely to lead to work zone incidents, including (1) setting up barriers to define a work zone perimeter that is close to an urban intersection; (2) striping/marking a road on an urban highway; and (3) installation of traffic sensors on the side of an urban highway. Finally, the authors proposed an integrated approach utilizing VR and wearable sensors to determine when, how, and at what frequency to push alarms to workers at work zones based on the physiological states of workers collected from the wearable sensors and workers’ behavior towards the alarms when they are in dangerous situations in VR. The approach is composed of four steps as: (1) recreating real-world work zones in VR, (2) enabling interactions in VR for construction activities, (3) conducting traffic simulation to obtain realistic traffic patterns near work zones and embedding vehicle movements in VR, and (4) developing a smartwatch application to send safety alarms and monitoring workers’ responses as well as their physiological states using wearable sensors.
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