Positive safety participation and assessment by integrating sharing technology with virtual reality

Abstract

Traditional health and safety performance in construction is assessed based on accessible outcomes such as accidents, injuries, illnesses and diseases. This lagging measurement still exists and is used by many industries since it is preferable for data collection, understandable to the majority, objective and valid. Many researchers are starting to treat the performance assessment in a much more proactive way by taking safety climate and culture into consideration. In current practice, as an indispensable part of safety climate/culture, safety participation level is merely evaluated by passive survey questions like "Have you attended the safety training", which ignores many invisible participation behaviors like safety knowledge transfer and sharing. What's more, although many traditional safety performance assessments are intended to modify construction workers' safety behavior, study on personal level safety assessment is still absent. To solve the problems above, this study firstly presents a systematic safety performance assessment framework on personal level, including not only traditional lagging indicators, but also positive indicators like participation and attitude. This framework is substantiated by comprehensive literature review. Then a positive safety participation and participation assessment method is designed by integrating sharing technology with virtual reality. The feasibility of this method is tested on a real worksite.