Exploring Construction Workers’ Attention and Awareness in Diverse Virtual Hazard Scenarios to Prevent Struck-By Accidents
Author/Presenter: Hussain, Rahat; Zaidi, Syed Farhan Alam; Pedro, Akeem; Lee, Heejae; Park, ChansikAbstract:
Repetitive tasks in construction reduce workers’ attentiveness of hazards on sites. This decline in attentiveness can be influenced by their situation awareness level. However, research on the relationship between attentiveness and situation awareness is scarce in the construction safety domain. This study employs eye-tracking techniques to investigate how visual attention changes due to variations in workers’ situation awareness levels. A virtual reality-based experiment was conducted to evaluate the situation awareness level of individual workers and examine its relationship with attentiveness towards different hazards using the situation awareness global assessment technique and linear regression analysis. The experimental findings reveal that the overall trend of allocating attention toward hazards declined over time. Furthermore, the attentiveness of workers varied depending on their situation awareness levels and the type of hazardous condition. Throughout the experiment, the group with a low situation awareness failed to sustain their vigilance toward hazards as effectively as the group with a high situation awareness. The outcomes of this study will help construction safety trainers understand variations in workers’ vigilance behavior over time and, thus mitigate the risk of accidents owing to inattentiveness at job sites.
Volume: 175
Publication Date: July 2024
Full Text URL: Link to URL
Publication Types: Books, Reports, Papers, and Research Articles
Topics: Alertness; Construction Safety; Hazards; Prevention; Road Construction Workers; Virtual Reality; Worker Safety