Personalized Construction Safety Interventions Considering Cognitive-Related Factors

Abstract

Eliminating workers’ unsafe behavior is one of the most important goals for onsite management and behavior-based safety programs have been widely used. However, the existing method lacks consideration of the worker’s inner and personal factors causing the decrease in the effectiveness of the measures. This study puts forward a personalization method for safety interventions and aims to examine the effectiveness and practicability of this change in safety interventions to reduce construction workers’ unsafe behaviors. Personalization of safety interventions was achieved through a diagnostic intervention model targeting the construction worker’s cognitive-based competence, psychological needs, and safety motivation with consideration of personality traits. The workers’ data were collected via a questionnaire and smart helmets on a building construction site. The results indicate that addressing these inner factors could achieve a persistent positive effect on construction workers’ safe behaviors. The effect size of improvement on cognitive-based competence is more than that of safety motivation. Improvements in long-term memory retrieval ability, subjective norms, and risk tolerance are the most significant in the cognitive-based competence. Personalized safety interventions and the current safety management are compatible. This study identifies two drivers behind the construction worker’s behaviors and contextualizes them into cognitive-based competence and safety motivation. The experiment shows that considering individual internal causes through the diagnosis of the two behavioral drivers is important in enhancing construction workers’ safety behavior. These changes in safety management have been found effective: personality traits are useful in determining the emotional tone for the expression of safety communication; psychological needs help promote safety motivation; improving cognitive-based competence or/and safety motivation can be set as the objectives of safety interventions. The participation of managerial personnel, especially supervisor and site supervisors, can help improve both the safety communication and safety performance. Smart helmets are useful in the personalized safety interventions by recording the worker’s behaviors and delivering safety instructions. The findings guide project managers in designing specific behavioral interventions to reduce construction workers’ unsafe behavior and provide an experimental protocol for the future studies.