Pilot Study to Investigate and evaluate Factors impacting Highway Construction Workers' Hazard Recognition Performance

公路建设工人就业影响因素调查与评价的初步研究

Pilot Study to Investigate and Evaluate Factors impacting Highway Construction Workers' Hazard Recognition Performance Project Summary Highway work zones are dangerous environments where any mistake in recognizing hazards could lead to a fatal outcome for workers. Highway construction workers have a high risk of exposure to two of the fatal four hazards, i.e., struck-by and caught-in-between. In 2020, over 102,000 work zone crashes occurred resulting in over 45,000 injuries and 857 fatalities. Workplace safety perception includes site hazard identification and risk measurement to prevent occurrences of accidents/incidents. This research serves as one of the initial studies to take a wholistic approach towards factors that impact highway workers’ cognitive load and its effect on their hazard recognition performance. Highway workers’ hazard recognition performance will be measured by a variety of objective and subjective metrics. To this end, interactive virtual reality highway work zone scenarios will be designed in collaboration with a panel of industry professionals. Forty Highway workers and construction students will be recruited to participate in the VR experiment. VR head-mount display equipped with eye-tracking technology will be used to understand how workers examine their environments during hazard recognition activities, and whether such search patterns change in response to different intrinsic and extrinsic factors. Eye movements will be recorded as the workers navigate the simulated virtual construction site and recognize safety hazards. During the experiment, the workers will be assigned to different tasks, under different environmental states. The experiments will also be conducted during different times of the day to evaluate the added impact of fatigue on the hazard recognition. Each participant will start with one normal scenario, and will gradually experience change in factors. The cognitive workload, which is highly connected to workers’ attention resource allocation, will be measured according to participants’ gaze fixation, visual search track, and attention map. After each experiment, participants will be asked to fill out a NASA-TLX questionnaire to collect their perceived cognitive workload. Following the prescriptive data analysis by comparing participants’ eye movement metrics and subjective feedback, recommendations will be provided towards the design of intervention systems to improve highway worker safety. The recommendations will specifically include: (1) need for augmenting workers hazard detection capability; (2) technology interventions that can be effectively used to help workers in hazard recognition. The proposed work will broadly contribute to NORA Strategic Goals in Construction sector (NORA agenda for construction sector- Objective 3: Struck-by)