Improving Construction Equipment Operation Safety from a Human-centered Perspective

Construction equipment-related accidents are a major cause of workplace fatalities and injuries in the construction industry. Particularly, visibility issue (i.e. blind spots) has been recognized as one of the primary reasons for construction equipment related accidents and injuries. Although attempts have been made to alleviate the problem by providing external assistance to operators and laborers, being struck by objects and equipment remains the third leading cause of construction fatalities (behind falls and transportation incidents) for the past decade. Therefore, an in-depth understanding of how operators respond to the external assistance has great potential to improve operation safety from a human-centered perspective. This paper highlights a promising method of employing external views that provides additional spatial information to overcome the visibility problem. Challenges are discussed in human spatial ability-related aspects such as the additional spatial information may increase mental workload and introduce difficulties in processing the information. At last, potential research directions and experiments are discussed.