Full text

Turn on search term navigation

© 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.

Abstract

The construction industry has witnessed a surge in heat-related accidents alongside rising summertime temperatures, exposing workers to potential injuries. The absence of specific heat stress standards by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) underscores the urgent need for more comprehensive and interactive educational materials to prevent such incidents in construction projects. This study proposes the adoption of an interactive Virtual Reality (VR) application to offer construction workers realistic and effective training, mitigating heat-related injuries. During the training sessions, VR headsets were utilized to immerse workers in two lifelike scenarios: (1) Addressing self-care during heat exhaustion; (2) Assisting a coworker experiencing heat exhaustion. A case study evaluated the effectiveness of the proposed VR training for 82 construction workers from two companies. Company A had traditional training, while Company B used VR training. Both groups took pre- and post-assessment surveys with six questions. The pre-assessment found no significant knowledge difference between the groups. After training, VR showed a significant reduction in incorrect answers compared to traditional training. Statistical tests confirmed the superiority of VR training (p-value = 0.00152 < 0.05), suggesting its effectiveness in preventing heat-related injuries in construction compared to traditional training methods.

Details

Title
Harnessing Virtual Reality to Mitigate Heat-Related Injuries in Construction Projects
Author
Alzarrad, Ammar 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Miller, Matthew 2 ; Chowdhury, Sudipta 3 ; McIntosh, James 3 ; Perry, Tyler 3 ; Shen, Ryan 3 

 Department of Civil Engineering, College of Engineering and Computer Sciences, Marshall University, Huntington, WV 25755, USA 
 Department of Computer Sciences and Electrical Engineering, College of Engineering and Computer Sciences, Marshall University, Huntington, WV 25755, USA; [email protected] 
 Weisberg Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, College of Engineering and Computer Sciences, Marshall University, Huntington, WV 25755, USA; [email protected] (S.C.); [email protected] (J.M.); [email protected] (T.P.); [email protected] (R.S.) 
First page
1157
Publication year
2023
Publication date
2023
Publisher
MDPI AG
e-ISSN
26734109
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
2904629438
Copyright
© 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.