Analyzing Spatial Patterns of Workers' Gait Cycles for Locating Latent Fall Hazards

Abstract

Hazard identification in construction typically relies on visual inspection. Visual inspection, however, is very time-consuming and error-prone due to the dynamic nature of the construction workplace and the limitations of human perception. Our previous study introduced a new approach, one that infers the existence of hazards by analyzing gait abnormality patterns of workers based on information from wearable inertial measurement units (IMU). Previous studies have not integrated such analysis with the two-dimensional spatial information of each gait cycle, which is essential to localize safety hazards in a typical construction workplace. To this end, this study used two-dimensional spatial information captured from ultra-wideband (UWB) localization technique and analyzed the spatial pattern of workers' gait cycles in typical construction settings. An experiment simulating an indoor brick installation space was conducted with different types of hazardous conditions (e.g., obstacles and slippery surfaces) to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach. The experiment results show that proposed approach is able to identify hazards and their locations during indoor brick installation work. This result highlights the potential of revealing latent fall hazards in an efficient and semi-automated way, hazards which may be difficult to recognize purely through visual inspection.