[This story from KBTX describes the use of VR and presence to increase safety for construction workers. See the original story for a 1:06 minute video report as well as Texas A&M Today for more on Namgyun Kim and the three-minute thesis competition he won, a poster presented at the 2021 Associated Schools of Construction Annual International Conference, and articles in Advanced Engineering Informatics and the
Journal of Construction Engineering and Management. A report from the Texas A&M School of Architecture
includes this:
“Similar to how a child is more careful to not touch a stove after burning their hand, [Prof. Changbum] Ahn says a worker who has experienced an accident becomes more alert of the dangerous behavior. Ahn hopes to create a similarly powerful and long-lasting memory without endangering a person’s body. To do this, Ahn and his team created a virtual, simulated working environment.
The first scenario is a pedestrian roadway worker doing a job around heavy machinery. A subject who enters the training is given an assignment in the virtual jobsite and is monitored as they work via eye movement tracking technology. Most subjects start habituating, or stop paying attention to safety signals, after just 15–20 minutes into the simulation, he said. When the worker stops paying attention to safety signals or being aware of what’s around them, trainers expose them to consequences.
‘We run them over with a streamroller,’ Ahn said. Subjects experience the visual sensation of the accident in virtual reality and punitive feedback via sound, vibration and electrical impulses from a backpack that stimulates their nerves. The shock is harmless, but the combined experience creates a more vivid simulation and, hopefully, a more sustained memory impact, said Ahn.”
–Matthew]
Texas A&M doctoral student creates virtual reality safety training for construction workers
Construction science student Nam Kim’s work on this topic won the university’s 2021-22 Three Minute Thesis competition
By Andy Krauss
January 31, 2022
COLLEGE STATION, Texas (KBTX) – A Texas A&M doctoral candidate has created a virtual reality simulator designed to help construction workers stay safe on the job.
Construction science PhD student Nam Kim says over 100 workers are killed in road work zones every year, but research has found that workers who have already experienced a workplace accident or injury are more sensitive to the hazards surrounding them.
Often times, the alarm beeps and rings on construction vehicles are functional when these workers suffer an accident on the job, Kim says.
“We found that our sensory organs and neuroactivities in our brains are designed so that if there are warning alarms that are constantly ringing around them, they stop paying attention and just focus on their task,” Kim said. “That’s one of the phenomenon that cause workers’ inattentive behavior at hazardous work places.”
That’s why Kim’s simulator has a worker perform a simple road cleaning task around moving construction vehicles so they can experience the consequences of their unsafe behaviors.
“During that time, many construction vehicles continuously move around the worker,” Kim said. “Using eye-tracking sensors, we measure how they respond to the approaching vehicles. If they continuously ignore the approaching construction vehicles, we trigger the accident and make them experience it.”
Kim says the goal is to understand more about how this virtual experience and the warning alarms affects the worker’s sensory responses. That’s why Kim and his team also measured the brain activity of those who used the simulator.
”After experiencing our VR environment, workers’ sensory response to warning alarms significantly increased,” Kim said. “It means that experiencing this VR safety training model influenced their sensory response to warning alarms.”
Kim says a large construction company in Houston used his simulator on 35 of its workers, and it was so satisfied with the results that management wants to use it for all their employees. He also says further research is now being funded by the National Science Foundation with a $750,000 grant.
What’s more, the virtual safety training Kim designed is also primed for the pandemic world.
“To be honest, I didn’t design this safety training for this pandemic period,” Kim said. “However, I found that usually the conventional safety training, all workers gathered in a classroom to take the class from the instructor. But with this VR safety training, we don’t need to do that. That will prevent an infection from spreading by many people gathering.”
Kim’s presentation of this research also earned first place at the university’s Three Minute Thesis competition in November, beating out nine other finalists. Thanks to his win, Kim now goes on to represent Texas A&M at the regional competition in Raleigh, North Carolina Feb. 19-22.
Kim worked in the construction industry before enrolling at Texas A&M and joining the construction sciences department. He says seeing workers become disabled as the result of tragic accidents on the job motivated his research on construction safety.
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