The Role of Automation in Right-time Construction Safety

Construction organizations continue to be challenged to adequately prevent accidents. Although the five C's (culture, competency, communication, controls, and contractors) have been focusing for many years on compliance, good practices, and best in class strategies, even industry leaders have only marginal improvements in recorded safety statistics. Right-time vs. real-time construction safety and health identifies three major focus areas to aid in the development of a strategic – as opposed to a tactical – response. (1) Occupational safety and health by design, (2) real-time safety and health monitoring and alerts, and (3) education, training, and feedback leveraging state-of-the-art technology provide meaningful predictive, quantitative, and qualitative measures to identify, correlate, and eliminate hazards before workers get injured or incidents cause collateral damage. Based on the current state-of-the-art of existing innovative initiatives in the occupational construction safety and health domain, a framework for right-time vs. real-time construction safety and health presents the specific focus on assisted safety and health data gathering, analysis and reporting to achieve a better safety performance. The practical as well as social implications in conducting a rigorous right-time safety culture in a construction business and its entire supply chain are tested in selected application scenarios and results are presented.