Detecting falls-from-height with wearable sensors and reducing consequences of occupational fall accidents leveraging IoT

2018-10-04
Labor intensive and hazardous nature of the construction activities plays an important role on the increase of the amount of accidents and fatalities on sites. One of the most important sources of fatalities occurring on construction sites is falls-from-height (FFH). Despite the various efforts for the solution over decades, the yearly statistics still indicate high amount of fatalities and severe injuries due to FFH accidents on construction sites. Medical literature emphasize that the time passed after the accident is a critical factor for avoiding preventable deaths and permanent disabilities of trauma patients. The objective of this study is to timely detect FFH accidents on construction sites by using a wearable device and to provide a real-time notification to the emergency medical team (EMT) leveraging Internet-of-Things (IoT). This is expected to maintain the earliest possible medical intervention on site in order to help reducing fatal and severe consequences of FFH accidents for construction workers. Test results of the system evaluation show that the fall is detected correctly and the alert message is sent to the prescribed addresses with 100% sensitivity. The system has shown a good accuracy for true detection of the fall height with an overall error rate of 10.8%. Another metric which shows the detection of the disconnected network time of the system has been surveyed and the results are accurate with an overall error rate of 3.16%

Suggestions

Detecting falls-from-height with wearable sensors and reducing the consequences of occupational fall accidents leveraging Internet-of-Things
Dogan, Onur; Akçamete Güngör, Aslı; Department of Civil Engineering (2019)
Hazardous and labor-intensive nature of the construction industry has a prominent impact on increasing the number of occupational accidents and fatalities in construction. Falls-from-height (FFH) is one of the most important sources of these fatalities. Despite many valuable prevention strategies and efforts implemented against occupational fall accidents on construction sites, the fatality rate records do not indicate a significant decrease. In medical literature, the time passed after the accident is crit...
Predicting the outcome of construction incidents
Ayhan, Bilal Umut; Tokdemir, Onur Behzat (Elsevier BV, 2019-03-01)
Ensuring the Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) is the utmost essential issue for all construction projects. The problem with the construction industry is that even though there is a significant emphasis on safety requirements, for most of the contractors unless requested by the client or enforced by law, there is a tendency to undermine safety management to save money especially in the case of competitive bidding including incident collection systems. The objective of this study is to develop a model to ...
Assessment and management of roof fall risks in underground coal mines
Düzgün, Hafize Şebnem; Einstein, HH (Elsevier BV, 2004-01-01)
Accidents caused by roof falls are commonly faced problems of underground coal mines. These accidents may have detrimental effects on workers in the form of injury, disability or fatality as well as mining company due to downtimes, interruptions in the mining operations, equipment breakdowns, etc. This study proposes a risk and decision analysis methodology for the assessment and management of risk associated with mine roof falls in underground coal mines. In the proposed methodology, risk assessment requir...
Examining the approaches of OHS professionals to the reasons for falls from height
Akarsu, Deniz; Özkan, Türker; Department of Occupational Health and Safety (2019)
Except motor vehicles accidents, the death rate on occupational accidents which occur falling from high places or into depths, is higher than any other accidents. According to the importance of the topic, in the study, examining the approaches of OHS professionals to the reasons and effects of occupational accidents which occur as falling from heights is aimed. For this, 100 accident inspection reports from Labor Inspection Board were surveyed. Accident reasons were derived from those reports. Those reasons...
Investigating the effects of lightweight recycled bumper and chassis system on vehicle crashworthiness
Gürer, Batuhan; Esat, Volkan; Sustainable Environment and Energy Systems (2016-8)
Accidents are one of the main reasons of death for people across the globe, among which automobile accidents are a major portion resulting in fatalities and various injuries. Crashworthiness is an engineering concept that is used to analyse the ability of vehicle structure to cover and protect passengers in the case of an accident or impact. Crashworthiness aims to affect the design of the structure of the vehicle so that it absorbs as much energy as it can which is sustained from an impact by plastic...
Citation Formats
O. DOGAN and A. Akçamete Güngör, “Detecting falls-from-height with wearable sensors and reducing consequences of occupational fall accidents leveraging IoT,” 2018, Accessed: 00, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/51837.