UAS for Construction Safety: Potential & Benefits

Article Critique

Construction leads every other industry in worker casualty as a result of occupational hazards (Jones, 2018). The type of activity carried out on site, the simultaneous interaction of personnel, plant and equipment; coupled with the dynamic movement of construction resources and constantly changing site environment makes the construction environment inherently accident prone (Kim et al., 2017; Idoro, 2011; Al-Tabtabai, 2002; Asan & Akasah, 2015). Hence in a bid to augment construction safety, Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) specifically requires employers to be responsible for the safety of the workplace (Koehn 1996). A safety supervisor is usually employed; with the duty to manage safety practices such as the use of personal protective equipment (PPE), and the oversight of safety training and safety regulation (Kim et al., 2017). To ease the work of the safety manager, there is increasing use of information and technology in construction safety (Wang et al., 2017; Gheisari & Esmaeili, 2016). In the article “UAS4SAFETY: The Potential of Unmanned Aerial Systems for Construction Safety Applications”, Masoud Gheisari., Javier Irizarry and Bruce N. Walker examined the potential application of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) in enhancing safety on construction job sites through the provision of real-time visual access to job site environments. While this article produced notable results showing that providing safety managers with a safety inspection assistant drone would be beneficial and can enable them to achieve the goals of the safety inspection; there are some questions with respect to the sample used for the research which might limit the replicability and generalizability of findings. Nonetheless, the article provides a distinctly positive standpoint with respect to the use of information and technology in bolstering construction H&S practices.

Gheisari and Irizary (2014) in their article studied the important concept of health and safety in construction; focusing on the responsibility of employers to provide a safe environment in which employees can safely carry out their duties. The duty of a safety manager to “observe” construction work was specifically highlighted as a means of preventing construction accidents. The writers recommended the use of a communication tool that can enable the safety manager to be present at any time and in different areas of the construction job site; while also providing the workers with real-time feedback. They introduced a quadrotor helicopter (AR.Drone quadricopter) as an early prototype of a safety manager’s assistant drone, and proposed that the drone can be used to fly frequently over the construction job site to provide the safety managers with real-time information about what is happening on the job site through frequent and direct observation as well as direct interaction. Gheisari and Irizary (2014) carried out a usability evaluation of the quadricopter using an expert analysis (Heuristic Evaluation) and a user participation analysis. Ten adult participants (5 male and 5 female) from Georgia Tech community were chosen to carry out a usability evaluation of the AR Drone quadricopter in order to test the hypotheses that the quadcopter would serve as a suitable inspection tool; and that the accuracy of the user in identifying safety-relevant features in a scene is directly related to the size of the screen that displays the scene image (in other words; the larger the screen size, the higher the accuracy of the image identified by the user). To test this hypothesis, the writers carried out an experiment in which the subjects would count the number of hardhats they could see in different images of the construction job site under three conditions (plain view, using iPad, and using iPhone). After performing the experiment, a repeated measure analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed to test the hypotheses that: (1) the quadcopter would serve as a suitable inspection tool; and (2) the accuracy of the user in identifying safety-relevant features in a scene has a direct relationship with the size of the screen that displays the scene image. A Shapiro-Wilk test (appropriate for small sample sizes) was used to derive the conclusion that display screen size is a major factor in satisfaction and perceived effectiveness.

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The researchers discussed an important topic, as the construction industry is still experiencing a high accident rate despite its recent adoption of technology in construction health and safety procedure. While the use of drones could be effectively used to augment construction health and safety, there are a few irregularities noticed in the research article which will make difficult the replicability of this sort of program; and this will be subsequently discussed in the text.

Gheisari and Irizary (2014) started off the article by highlighting the importance of creating a safe environment for construction and listed some 8 root causes of construction accidents and eventually reiterated that observation is needed to prevent the root cause of accidents on site. This assertion that onsite observation is tantamount to the creation of a safe environment is disagreed by (Albert and Hallowell, 2012; Harvey, 2001) in their articles in which they opined that the safety performance of work-crew is hinged on the ability of a worker to identify and respond to hazards in the environment; thus stressing the need for workers to be made to go through formal hazard recognition training programs in order to enable them to use their sensory cues to actively gather information necessary for identifying conditions that are precursors to the loss of safety on site. While it is agreeable that the duty of a safety manager to frequently walk around the job site and get real-time data is important, consideration must be given to the fact that different types of accident happen at different construction sites, and some inherent hazards cannot be extinguished by mere observation of the construction site (Williams et al., 2018; Radmin, 2017; Asanka & Ranasinghe, 2015). Safety experts in the industry assert that the primary causes of job site injuries and fatalities could be greatly minimized with advanced planning and coordination as a proactive approach towards construction health and safety (Ventura, 2016; Bigham, 2018). These alternative viewpoints to safety highlight the total incomprehensiveness of the literature review, and a need for a more robust review of construction safety.

Another limitation observed in the literature review is its sole focus on the “usability” of technology, and neglect of “acceptation” of technology. Gheisari & Irizary (2014) in their article asserted that the ultimate goal of their effort was to provide a job site free of hazard to workers, and that UAS can be an ideal safety inspection assistant; providing a safety manager with real-time access to videos or images from a range of predefined paths and locations around the job site, as well as voice interaction with construction workers. While this holds true, no mention was made on how to handle several social challenges that might accompany the use of a drone on the construction job site; hence their proposed conceptual system was not validated by construction safety managers as it carried little information on the opinions of actual safety managers collected in the field (Gheisari & Esmaeili, 2016). The correctness of the study in terms of UAS use in safety-related operations was discredited by the fact that little information was collected from actual safety managers in the field (Gheisari & Esmaeili, 2016). Inherent downsides of a drone such as the loud noise generated by drone (Goering, n.d.), short drone flight time (Ballard, 2018), and the possibility of interference causing a delay in the real-time transmission of images and videos (Yajnanarayana, Wang, Gao, Muruganathan, & Lin Ericsson, 2018) are but some crucial factors that could influence the adoption of the drone system in safety management. As it stands, it remains to be seen if the use of drones will be accepted by construction workers who are already used to having a safety manager walk through the construction job site to check the safety requirements (Gheisari & Irizary, 2014). Having a safety assistant drone which flies over the job site and sometimes allows safety managers to talk to workers remotely might seem awkward to construction workers, hence there needs to be a more robust literature review that is inclusive of the acceptation of the technology, rather than its usability alone.

A critical review of the article methodology showed that there was no explicitly stated 'research question' that justifies the significance of the study. However, the selected participants that make up the sample size provides a greater cause for concern with respect to the accuracy of the study findings. The size of the sample that was used consisted of ten adult participants (5 male and 5 female), and such a small sample size makes it difficult to generalize the findings of the experiment on a larger community. Another constraint of the sample size is the location from which they were chosen (from the same institution; Georgia Tech community). The researchers did not indicate the criteria that informed their choice of participants, neither did they specify how they controlled the probable bias of response similarity as a result of the proximity of location the participants were selected from. This means that a larger community might feel differently about the preference of the iPad to the iPhone, hence questioning the universality of the research findings.

Also, the participant preference of screen display size was not established before the experiment. This means that the outcome of the experiment might have been as a result of the predisposition of participants to a larger screen (iPad), and not the unsuitability of the smaller screen (iPhone) as proven by the research experiment. This could have been an important factor that impacted the answers to the subjective survey questions, as well as the observed accuracy of the iPad images over the iPhone images; and the research methodology didn’t indicate how this important observation could have impacted the choice of the gadget by participants during the experiment.

The article of Gheisari & Irizary (2014) concluded with the assertion that providing safety managers with a safety inspection assistant drone will be extremely beneficial to the achievement of the goals of safety management. Even though the research assertion isn't false, it doesn’t take into cognizance several factors that culminate into site safety, and hence cannot be a generalizable assertion for other site locations. An important factor in consideration is the dynamic nature of the construction industry. According to Fenrick and Getachew (2012), construction accident data are typically large, heterogeneous and dynamic; and there exists a nonlinear relationship among accident causation variables in different construction sites (Gholizadeh and Esmaeili, 2016). This practically makes it difficult for the data generated from the Quadrotor helicopter to be used to generalize inferences to other construction projects, except through the use of other dedicated software. Hence it is safe to say the conclusion of the research finding is fallacious.

This article focused on a crucial topic within the construction industry, as the dynamic movement of construction resources; coupled with the increasing complexity of construction work and the trend of accidents in construction continues to make the issue of construction health and safety a matter of high priority in the industry. The use of information and technology in construction health and safety is gradually increasing (Wang et al., 2017; Gheisari & Esmaeili, 2016); and Gheisari and Irizary (2014) in their research provided insight into the applicability of drones in the performance of site management duty. However, the information considered before conclusions were drawn from the research wasn’t enough for the research findings to gain approval from actual site managers. The study did not explicitly specify the criteria for choosing the small sample size, and there was an observed lack of diversity among participants that could limit the generalizability of the research findings. Moreover, certain subtle but critical information concerning participants that could impact research findings were unprovided (e.g. individual screen size display preference, bandwagon effect due to the similarity of the location of selected participants, etc.), especially for information that could influence the research results. In conclusion, future research on drone suitability for site management should be done with a clear specification of the factors that culminate into the acceptance of the use of drones by construction workers, while the opinion of site managers should not be taken with levity. Improvements can also be made on the research methodology especially in terms of the size and structure of the sample size in order to ease the application of the research findings in the augmentation of the health and safety condition into the construction industry at large.

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