A smartphone-based detection of fall portents for construction workers

Abstract

The construction industry accounts for nearly half of all industry-related fatalities in Taiwan. Identified as the leading cause of such fatalities for several decades, falls also contribute to almost half of work-related fatalities. Given the strenuous nature of construction work, workers are prone to loss of awareness and balance, increasing the safety risk and number of fall accidents. Previous studies have indicated that loss of awareness may be the major cause of occupational injuries or fatalities, and identified the strong correlation between falls and loss of balance. Thus, real-time monitoring of the mental and balance conditions of workers may help identify fall portents, and thus prevent falls from happening. This paper describes a framework for developing a personal safety monitoring system based on a smartphone, which receives external signals wirelessly from motion sensors and brain wave sensors attached to a vest and inside a helmet, and transmit these signals to a monitoring server for further analysis. This paper also presents an experiment with preliminary findings regarding the detection of fall portents, using the internal motion sensors of a smartphone. In the experiment, participants performed a tiling task on a scaffold under four physiological statuses. We identified the fall portents based on the self-awareness of the participants, hazardous actions performed by the participants, and outsider observations by experiment administrators. An accelerometer-based threshold algorithm was tested, and its performance was evaluated against the identified fall portents. The results indicated that the work-related motions had a limited impact on the detection algorithm. The accuracy for the sleepiness, fatigue, normal, and inebriation statuses were 92.3%, 90.4%, 77.3%, and 68.8%, respectively. The algorithm exhibited an overall accuracy of 86%, thus, we conclude that using a smartphone to detect fall portents in a working scenario is feasible, and deserves further investigation. (C) 2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd.