Toward the improvement of safety planning for construction activities performed at high elevation by using augmented reality

Many of the activities in construction tend to lead to accident occurrences. The major causation of the accidents in this industry is fall from height. In developing countries such as Thailand, there are too many unsafe conditions in construction activities performed at high elevation. Although, the government enforces safety rules and regulations, safety facilities are still provided inadequately. The involved parties such as construction engineers and supervisors do not pay much attention to unsafe conditions, which may be caused by ignorance and unawareness of those personnel regarding hazards and risks. To eliminate unsafe conditions and to reduce a number of accidents, in-charge personnel should definitely have knowledge related with the requirements of safety procedures and safety facilities of construction activities performed at high elevation. It is more effective to enable those personnel gain experiences and perceive inherent hazards and risks of those activities in the actual construction environment. Thus, an innovative approach is needed to provide the personnel with visualized information of those activities as they occur in real construction site. This study aims to develop a visualized approach for simulating the construction activities operated at high elevation using Augmented Reality to educate construction personnel. The improvement of construction personnel considerations in safety planning is investigated. The proposed system consists of the following: (1) hardware components, including a laptop computer, a video camera, and a head-mounted display (HMD), (2) three databases, i.e., database of virtual model of construction objects, database of hazards, risks, and consequences, and database of safe and unsafe scenarios, and (3) a computer program for generating and superimposing the simulations into the real world scene. This research is on-going and the prototype systems are under development. The prototype will be tested at a real construction site. In this stage, we propose the approach and system architecture.