• Journal of the Korea Safety Management & Science
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• v.24 no.4
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• pp.71-83
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• 2022

This study is to investigate the degree of field awareness of how each provision of the Serious Disaster Punishment Act will affect accident prevention. As a result of conducting a survey of construction site workers, it was analyzed that construction site workers had a low sense of safety and did not voluntarily engage in safety activities. And it can be seen that they are taking a very passive position that it is efficient to implement safety under the supervision of the supervisor. Workers who need voluntary construction site safety activities are most aware of the situation at the site, but the problem was pointed out as "lack of procedures for listening to opinions and preparing improvement measures" for these problems. Future research is needed to see if this is a problem for individual workers or for those in charge of safety and health who do not correct it even though active opinions have been submitted.

• International conference on construction engineering and project management
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• 2022.06a
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• pp.736-743
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• 2022

Construction workers experience a high rate of fatal incidents from mobile equipment in the industry. One of the major causes is the decline in the acoustic condition of workers due to the constant exposure to construction noise. Previous studies have proposed various ways in which audio sensing and machine learning techniques can be used to track equipment's movement on the construction site but not on the audibility of safety signals. This study develops a novel framework to help automate safety surveillance in the construction site. This is done by detecting the audio sound at a different signal-to-noise ratio of -10db, -5db, 0db, 5db, and 10db to notify the worker of imminent dangers of mobile equipment. The scope of this study is focused on developing a signal processing model to help improve the audible sense of mobile equipment for workers. This study includes three-phase: (a) collect audio data of construction equipment, (b) develop a novel audio-based machine learning model for automated detection of collision hazards to be integrated into intelligent hearing protection devices, and (c) conduct field experiments to investigate the system' efficiency and latency. The outcomes showed that the proposed model detects equipment correctly and can timely notify the workers of hazardous situations.

• Korean Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.13-22
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• 2024

On January 8, 2021, the Act on the Punishment of Severe Disasters passed the Legislation and Judiciary Committee and has been in effect in earnest since January 2022. However, safety accidents at construction sites are still continuing, and it is necessary to discuss ways to improve the safety awareness of construction workers. Therefore, in this study, data were collected through a survey of construction site workers, and the effect of the organizational climate of the workplace on the level of safety consciousness of workers was studied. As a result of the study, the factors of organizational structure, guaranteeing autonomy and consideration of supervisors among the organizational climate of the workplace had a positive effect on the improvement of workers' safety awareness. Based on this, this researcher suggested that workers should be delegated the authority to perform some tasks according to the situation and content of the work during the field work and that incentives should be compensated according to performance.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.37 no.6
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• pp.102-107
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• 2022

South Korea will soon be a super-aged society, as more than 20.6% of its population will be 65 years and older by 2025. As of 2022, 17.5% of the total population in South Korea is 65 years and older, which exceeds the set threshold for an aged society, where more than 14% of the population is 65 years and older. The proportion of older subway construction workers has increased. Aging workers and their work stress negatively impact their workability. A previous study demonstrated that the stress index measured using the uBioMacpa measurement device (Macpa stress index) had a significant correlation with work stress in South Korea. The device tests vascular health and measures stress levels via Macpa signal analysis. In this study, the pulse waves of subway construction workers were measured using uBioMacpa to identify their stress levels. The stress levels were analyzed by age, years of service, job position, employment type, and work type. Herein, these statistics could not be easily represented by a normal distribution; therefore, the Kruskal-Wallis test, a nonparametric statistical method, was used for the analysis of data. The results showed that age, job position, employment type, and working type affected the Macpa stress index and the stress levels of workers increased with age. In terms of job position, technical engineers were more stressed than other workers because of their poor working environment. In terms of employment type, daily-wage workers were more stressed than other workers. In terms of working type, tunneling, waterproofing, and construction scored the highest Macpa stress indexes without any significant difference, whereas earthworks scored the lowest. Based on the analysis of Macpa stress index, safety and health management plans were proposed to reduce the stress levels of workers. Moreover, a manual for efficient stress management must be developed for subway construction workers.

• Annals of Occupational and Environmental Medicine
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• v.35
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• pp.26.1-26.15
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• 2023

Background: The objective of this study is to investigate the differences in incidence rates of targeted diseases by classification of occupations among construction workers in Korea. Methods: In a subject-based cohort of the Korean Construction Worker's Cohort, we surveyed a total of 1,027 construction workers. As occupational exposure, the classification of occupations was developed using two axes: construction business and job type. To analyze disease incidence, we linked survey data with National Health Insurance Service data. Eleven target disease categories with high prevalence or estimated work-relatedness among construction workers were evaluated in our study. The average incidence rates were calculated as cases per 1,000 person-years (PY). Results: Injury, poisoning, and certain other consequences of external causes had the highest incidence rate of 344.08 per 1,000 PY, followed by disease of the musculoskeletal system and connective tissue for 208.64 and diseases of the skin and subcutaneous tissue for 197.87 in our cohort. We especially found that chronic obstructive pulmonary disease was more common in construction painters, civil engineering welders, and civil engineering frame mold carpenters, asthma in construction painters, landscape, and construction water proofers, interstitial lung diseases in construction water proofers. Conclusions: This is the first study to systematically classify complex construction occupations in order to analyze occupational diseases in Korean construction workers. There were differences in disease incidences among construction workers based on the classification of occupations. It is necessary to develop customized occupational safety and health policies for high-risk occupations for each disease in the construction industry.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.24 no.6
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• pp.111-118
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• 2009

As the construction project gets bigger in scale, the actual construction itself is becoming more complex. The construction accidents occupy 26.18 percent of total death disaster according to the accidents report in 2007. It is the highest figure among the entire industry, and it shows how serious the construction accident is. In order to reduce accidents occurred in the construction industry, we should find the accident characteristics of construction workers by age. In this study, we investigated 589 cases of fatal accidents, and classified them by trades, type of works, the things that caused the accident, how they occurred, and size. We then identified accident characteristics for each group by analysing them in accordance with workers age. The result of analysis showed that in carpenter and common laborer, the number of death accidents increased as the workers age increased. Another characteristics were that the number of death accidents increased as the age increased in finishing work and reinforced concrete construction and in a smaller-scale businesses, respectively. Common labor was the trade with the highest number of death accidents and the laborers of 50 age or higher in age in finishing working type were the most vulnerable to death accidents.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Building Construction
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.163-169
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• 2020

Construction is a typical labor-dependent industry. However, problems related to wage payment, which directly affects the livelihood of workers, have caused other problems in maintaining skilled workers, such as increasing the turnover rate of skilled workers, resulting in a shortage of skilled workers. Against this backdrop, this study was conducted to develop measures to improve the conventional wage payment systems in order to prevent skilled workers from leaving their jobs and to maintain them as workers. It is necessary to make the registration of non-registered small-sized construction companies in Korea mandatory, and to introduce means by which construction companies that hire workers through non-registered agents can be penalized. In addition, the project bank account (PBA) system used in the domestic banking sector can be benchmarked in operating payment systems, an approach that is expected to effectively prevent delayed wage payments in the construction industry.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Building Construction Conference
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• 2014.05a
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• pp.40-41
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• 2014

Today, the potential safety risk is increased due to a construction industry is high-rised, mechanized, and complexed. Most workers injured in accident caused by lack of safety awareness. Therefore the safety education is focused in construction site, but it can not get workers' interest and has many problems to reduce construction accident. This study will investigate the effects of education used BIM intended for workers in construction site to verify the objective effectiveness in future.

• International conference on construction engineering and project management
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• 2022.06a
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• pp.1085-1092
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• 2022

Travel distance is a parameter mainly used in the objective function of Construction Site Layout Planning (CSLP) automation models. To obtain travel distance, common approaches, such as linear distance, shortest-distance algorithm, visibility graph, and access road path, concentrate only on identifying the shortest path. However, humans do not necessarily follow one shortest path but can choose a safer and more comfortable path according to their situation within a reasonable range. Thus, paths generated by these approaches may be different from the actual paths of the workers, which may cause a decrease in the reliability of the optimized construction site layout. To solve this problem, this paper adopts reinforcement learning (RL) inspired by various concepts of cognitive science and behavioral psychology to generate a realistic path that mimics the decision-making and behavioral processes of wayfinding of workers on the construction site. To do so, in this paper, the collection of human wayfinding tendencies and the characteristics of the walking environment of construction sites are investigated and the importance of taking these into account in simulating the actual path of workers is emphasized. Furthermore, a simulation developed by mapping the identified tendencies to the reward design shows that the RL agent behaves like a real construction worker. Based on the research findings, some opportunities and challenges were proposed. This study contributes to simulating the potential path of workers based on deep RL, which can be utilized to calculate the travel distance of CSLP automation models, contributing to providing more reliable solutions.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.136-145
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• 2018

Companies that have suffered serious labor shortages are relocating their factories abroad where they can solve this problem by increasing the employment of foreign workers. Construction sites also employ foreign workers to supplement the scarce manpower, and the demand for foreign workers has been gradually increasing over time. Recently, based on discussions on whether or not to introduce foreign workers, the policy on the input of foreign workers into domestic construction sites has been shifted to exploring the actual input conditions and efficient management methods. In this study, we investigated the current status and input situation of foreign workers at the construction sites of the target area, analyzed the problems they posed from the manager's viewpoint, and derived a method of improving the utilization of foreign workers at construction sites. In order to proceed with this study, we surveyed the actual situation of the construction sites, which consisted mainly of foreign workers and domestic workers (managers), by investigating the construction sites, and conducted 1: 1 interviews to ensure the reliability of the survey. The data obtained from the survey were analyzed using the SPSS analysis program, and the response rate was analyzed for each item. As a result, various problems, such as institutional problems, communication problems, and quality deterioration due to malfunction, appeared. Therefore, this study derives an improvement plan for the efficient utilization of foreign workers by improving the institutional level related to their language education, wages and employment.