Designing Proactive Fall Prevention for Autonomous Monitoring

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Abstract. Falling from height is one of the major causes of fatalities in construction industry. The advancement and recent deployment of various sensing and mobile computing technologies on construction jobsite has provided an opportunity to achieve an autonomous safety monitoring system to prevent falling from height and hence improve safety performance of the industry. This paper presents the preliminary result of the first stage of the research on our envisioned autonomous safety monitoring system. In the paper, the authors defined the dynamic safe working zone model and its parameter determination. The safety knowledge introduced in this paper can serves as the foundation of actual system design and implementation.

1 Introduction

Although accident rate in construction industry has been decreasing, fallings from height consistently account for one of the greatest number of fatalities in our industry. Among all the causes contributing to falling from height, working surface and platform, worker’s behaviors and attitude, construction structure and facilities are three most mentioned causes in literatures (Hu etl, 2009). Works at height in construction industry usually take place in dynamic and complex environment and workers are not always aware of or do not have proper evaluation of surrounding risks. To maximize worker’s awareness of risks, existing practices include setting warning signs/barriers and using supervisors/colleagues to warn a worker if they happen to see him/her exposes to risks of falling. Recent advancement of sensing and ubiquitous computing technologies have been introduced to construction industry for material management to improve productivity and reduce material waste (Caldas 2006, Pradhan 2009). The inf...

... middle of paper ...

...ocuses on the implementation and validation of the proactive fall prevention system.

Works Cited

Hu, K., H. Rahmandad, T. Smith-Jackson and W. W. Winchester (2009). Factors influencing risk of falls: A review of evidence in construction. Under review at Construction Management and Economics

C.H. Caldas, D. Grau, C.T. Haas, Using Global Positioning System to Improve Materials-Locating Processes on Industrial Projects, Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 132 (2006) 741-749

A. Pradhan, E. Ergen, B. Akinci, Technological Assessment of Radio Frequency Identification Technology for Indoor Localization, Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering, 23 (2009) 230-238.

OSHA. Safety and Health Regulations for Construction. Subpart M: Fall Protection. (1926).

OSHA. Occupational Safety and Health Standards. Subpart O: Machinery and Machine Guarding (1910).

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