NSF grant funds work to improve construction site safety
Hardhats and neon vests may be obvious protective gear for construction workers, but a research project underway at The Ohio State University aims to advance the use of wearable sensors for on-the-job safety and wellness.
Integrated Systems Engineering Assistant Professor Parinaz Naghizadeh is collaborating with researchers from Penn State University and the University of Delaware on “Future of Construction Workplace Health Monitoring,” which received a $1.8 million National Science Foundation grant to develop an artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled, real-time and context-aware holistic health monitoring approach for construction workers.
“We want to design and fabricate a flexible wireless sensing device that can capture workers' diverse physiological signals and biological markers to the stressors in the field and can be worn in a way that is non-invasive and non-disruptive to workers,” said Penn State Assistant Professor Houtan Jebelli, the project's principal investigator. “We also want to develop innovative machine learning algorithms and frameworks to infer meaningful cues from the elicited bodily responses for continuous and real-time assessment of workers' holistic health conditions.”
To maintain the privacy of workers, the researchers plan to develop a digital twin-assisted mechanism. A digital twin is a virtual replica of a system that is used for simulating or forecasting. This mechanism could both provide individual workers with personalized feedback on their health — for example, letting them know if they are becoming overheated so they can take steps to correct that — while also de-identifying the health measures from the individuals to create digital health maps that represent collective health information at a job site without compromising workers' privacy.
The data will help researchers determine patterns, including early detection of physical fatigue, mental stress and exposure to heat stress. “Our initial thoughts are to make sure the workers are hydrated and to determine any stress factors,” Naghizadeh said. “Existing data shows that the construction workplace has one of the highest rates of work-related mental health and stress.”
While the NSF grant is more about collaborative research than commercialization, Naghizadeh noted that the researchers hope to provide a proof of concept with tools that are reusable as well as scalable.
She said that while wearable sensors exist that illustrate some of the on-the-job stressors construction workers face, there is not one “geared for all the health indicators we are after. It has to be compact enough and lightweight with a sufficiently long battery life.”
“Our envisioned worker-centered health-monitoring mechanism based on advances in wearable sensor fabrication, predictive analytics and privacy-aware information visualization could be applied beyond the construction industry,” Jebelli added, citing military, mining, manufacturing and athletics as examples.
Compiled from articles on Dept. of Integrated Systems Engineering and Penn State websites.
