Trends and Limitations of Current Construction Safety Technologies

Significant research and industry attention is focused on the applications of new technologies to improve construction safety, with a particular interest in adapting technologies to enhance hazard identification and avoidance in all project phases, from design to project completion. However, the current literature on construction safety technologies primarily focuses on the proposed technologies’ functionality, feasibility, and benefits. It is mainly limited to individual technology types rather than adopting a comprehensive view of combinations of safety technology sets, laboratory or controlled performance testing of the proposed technology, or the number and duration of on-site experiments by actual stakeholders. Also, the proposed technologies are largely evaluated without considering other critical non-technical factors such as the human “user” factor, adoption factors, and change resistance, to name a few. The objective of this paper is to review innovations in construction safety technologies to identify gaps in the literature, to identify common limitations and trends in proposed technologies, and to provide suggestions to address these limitations and gaps. This study examines the impact of proposed safety technologies by dividing construction safety into four phases (pre-construction, worker safety training, safety management, and construction) and also identifies four main areas for on-site construction safety improvement (safety monitoring and proximity sensing, near-miss fall detection, hardhat-wearing monitoring, and workers emotions), while highlighting common limitations of the proposed technologies in order to guide and facilitate future research to effectively address these gaps and limitations.