Research Trends of Information Technology Application in Construction Workers’ Behavior Monitoring

In construction, about 80%–90% of accidents are associated with workers’ unsafe behavior. It is widely agreed that monitoring workers’ behavior can help reduce accidents, but it would be restrained by the limitation of traditional methods like observation. With the development of information technology, construction safety has been improved by monitoring construction workers’ behavior. A systematic overview of current research would provide consolidated information, including lack of current research and future research direction, for researchers and practitioners. However, there are few such systematic overviews of construction workers’ behavior safety monitoring by information technology. Therefore, this paper reviews previous research in monitoring workers’ behavior in order to understand the current status and tendency of techniques. To be specific, this paper classifies previous studies into three categories: vision-based technology, radio frequency based technology and fusion technology. Several issues on practical application are identified including the negative effect of using cameras to capture workers’ operations and limited types of workers’ unsafe behavior. These challenges indicate that further study in these areas is required. Accordingly, this paper proposes future research directions to enhance the automatic monitoring of workers’ behavior for construction safety.