Adoption of Digital Occupational Safety and Health Technologies in the Construction Sector

Abstract: The construction sector is a considerable contributor to a country's economy. For example, there are more than 300 000 people employed in the construction sector in Sweden. Unfortunately, workers’ safety is a big problem in this high-employment sector since the potential risk for injury is high. In Sweden, workers in the construction industry are among the most injured, both in terms of work-related accidents and occupational injuries. With more technology advances, there has been an increasing interest in the construction sector regarding new technologies in recent years which also includes occupational safety and health technologies. The reason behind this growing interest could be creating more efficiency, increasing productivity, increasing safety, and keeping up with technical development in general. Studies have shown that the safety management in the construction sector is a serious challenge, despite the many efforts to prevent and reduce occupational accidents and injuries in this sector. Therefore there has been an increasing drive for replacing traditional safety approaches with modern safety technologies.  The objective of this thesis work was to investigate the current state of digital technologies adopted in the construction industry specifically for occupational health and safety.  A qualitative research approach was utilized in the current study, using two methods. The first method was an interview with OSH professionals, digital responsible, technology developer and construction workers from different construction companies. The second method was a scoping review of websites and documents to ascertain different types of safety technologies that have been investigated previously.  The results provide a list of different types of safety technologies that have been investigated previously and a versatile overview of safety technology's development process, adoption process, and facilitators and barriers for a successful adoption.  This study points out the benefits of utilizing safety technologies and provides extensive information regarding the adoption of safety tools, that could encourage engaged actors in the field to strive for more safety technologies which could lead to a safer work environment and healthyworker.