Although hazard identification is one of the most important steps of safety management process, numerous hazards remain unidentified in the construction workplace due to the dynamic environment of the construction site and the lack of available resource for visual inspection. To this end, our previous study proposed the collective sensing approach for safety hazard identification and showed the feasibility of identifying hazards by capturing collective abnormalities in workers' walking patterns. However, workers generally performed different activities during the construction task in the workplace. Thereby, an additional process that can identify the worker's walking activity is necessary to utilize the proposed hazard identification approach in real world settings. In this context, this study investigated the feasibility of identifying walking activities during construction task using Wearable Inertial Measurement Units (WIMU) attached to the worker's ankle. This study simulated the indoor masonry work for data collection and investigated the classification performance with three different machine learning algorithms (i.e., Decision Tree, Neural Network, and Support Vector Machine). The analysis results showed the feasibility of identifying worker's activities including walking activity using an ankle-attached WIMU. Moreover, the finding of this study will help to enhance the performance of activity recognition and hazard identification in construction.
The authors would like to acknowledge Dr. Terry Stentz-Associate Professor, Durham School of Architectural Engineering and Construction, UNL-for designing and conducting the experiment. This study was financially supported by the NSF grant CMMI #1538029. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.