Impacts of Safety Capacity and Personalized Safety Training on Construction Workers’ Hazard Recognition Using Eye-Tracking Technology

Abstract

Despite efforts of governments and practitioners in formulating and implementing safety regulations and measures, it remains challenging for construction workers to entirely detect and avoid construction hazards, resulting in frequent incidents and causing severe injuries and substantial property losses. Previous studies focused on analyzing the impacts of external factors and individual factors on construction workers’ hazard recognition, while the impacts of safety capacity and personalized safety training were less studied. To fill in the research gap, this study aims to quantify construction workers’ hazard recognition level with different safety capacity and before and after personalized safety training. To this end, an eye-tracking experiment was conducted with 36 subjects to validate that eye-movement indicators (EMIs) could measure individuals’ hazard recognition and to quantify the effects of safety capacity and personalized safety training on hazard recognition. The experimental results showed that effective eye-movement predictors of hazard recognition performance included average hazard recognition duration, average fixation count, average fixation duration, and fixation spatial density. In addition, the three dimensions of safety capacity effectively distinguish among groups of varying hazard recognition level, with exhibiting knowledge and skills the most significant difference. The workers’ hazard recognition level significantly improved after personalized safety training. The findings of this study contribute to knowledge of applying eye-tracking technology on the influence factors of hazard recognition and practical measures such as personalized safety training to improve construction safety level.