Increasing Work Zone Safety: Worker Behavioral Analysis with Integration of Wearable Sensors and Virtual Reality

Despite increased regulations, restrictive measures, and use of warning devices, work zone injuries and fatalities are still observed at highway construction projects and alarms and notification systems are often ignored. With a vision to reduce the number of work zone injuries and fatalities, this research is aimed at understanding the key parameters (e.g., work zone location characteristics, personal vigilance levels, types of construction work) that play roles in achieving responsive behaviors in workers. How we can calibrate alarm systems for getting responsive actions from workers? What are the optimal modalities, frequencies, and timings of notifications in these calibrated systems? Through wearable sensors and realistic representations of work zones in virtual reality, researchers collected worker behavioral and physiological responses to alarms issued under various realistic scenarios alongside various warning mechanisms (e.g., sensory, visual, audial). With a further data collection and analysis, the outcome of this research will help to calibrate when, at what frequency, and how to optimally share warnings with work zone inhabitants for effective responses towards the reduction of incidents.

Professor Semiha Ergan
Zhengbo Zou is a Ph.D. Candidate from BiLab in the Department of Civil and Urban Engineering at New York University. His research is at the intersection of construction management, data science and neuroscience. Driven by the goal of a quantitative understanding of human experience in built environments, he works on the optimal design, construction and control of civil infrastructures using body area sensors and building sensor networks. Prior to NYU, he received his Masters in Civil Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and his Bachelors in Civil Engineering from Tongji University.

Dr. Semiha Ergan is an Assistant Professor of the Department of Civil and Urban Engineering and Computer Science and Engineering (courtesy) at New York University, and an associated faculty at CUSP. With her background in civil engineering, data science, and building informatics, she works on improving buildings’ performance during design, construction, and operation phases. She leads the Building Informatics and Visualization Lab (biLAB), where she actively seeks data-driven and model-based solutions to operational challenges associated with construction and operation of civil infrastructure systems, with an emphasis on buildings. Her work has been supported by DOE, NSF, DARPA, and private organizations. Her achievements have been recognized by a number of awards, including most recently the DARPA Young Faculty Award (2015) and the Construction Industry Institute New Scholar Award (2015). She is the Vice Chair for ASCE TCCIT Visualization, Information Modeling and Simulation Committee, an Associate Editor of ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering, and academic committee member of Construction Industry Institute.

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