The availability of wearable-device-based physical data for the measurement of construction workers' psychological status on site: From the perspective of safety management

Workers' unsafe behaviors have been recognized as one of the main causes to construction accidents, while the existing research shows that workers' psychological status on site has a direct influence on their behaviors. Thus monitoring workers' psychological status may benefit the reduction of unsafe behaviors on site, thus preventing accident from occurring. However, due to the lack of appropriate methods to collect jobsite workers' psychological data, it is difficult for the existing research to reveal the relationship between psychological status and unsafe behavior. This research proposes an efficient wearable technology-based method to collect jobsite workers' psychological data to support such an analysis. Wearable-device-based physical data collection has been regarded as a promising approach to study human's psychological status in the field of psychology, and applied to pedagogy and clinical psychology, but seldom in the construction industry. The purpose of this research is to study the availability of the approach in construction safety management. To do this, an on-site experiment was conducted to collect workers' physical data via using wearable devices, as well as psychological data through the use of PANAS (Positive and Negative Affect Schedule) and DRM (Day Reconstruction Method). Based on the data, the correlations between workers' psychological status and physical data are analyzed. The results show that jobsite workers' physical data is available for the measurement of workers' psychological status. This research will contribute to the research on jobsite workers' psychology in the context of real construction sites, as well as the identification of the mental causes of workers' unsafe behaviors on site, thus improving the performance of construction safety management.