IMU Based Smart Safety Hook for Fall Prevention at Construction Sites

Fall from height (FFH) at the construction sites has the major portion of the total accidents; it may be due to traditional methods of monitoring at the site. For the site manager, manual monitoring is difficult, as some workers avoid wearing PPE at the risk area. To overcome this issue and eliminate the FFH accidents, a Smart Safety Hook (SSH) system is proposed. A preliminary experiment is carried out to record the kinematics and tilt angle of the safety hook from an IMU sensor in real-time through User Datagram Protocol (UDP) Communication. Machine learning algorithms (SVM, Naive Bayes, KNN, etc.) are trained to detect the status of a safety hook as attached and unattached in 3 testing scenarios. The result of this research demonstrates the opportunity of utilizing SSHs at the construction site to eliminate the FFH incidents in real-time with high accuracy and precision. Furthermore, the proposed SSH device may help facilitate the construction workers at the elevation and assure safety in real-time.