• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.37 no.3
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• pp.24-33
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• 2022

Construction site fatalities accounted for 51.9% of the total fatalities recorded in 2020. It is known that the safety leadership of site managers is important in reducing occupational accidents at construction sites. According to previous domestic and foreign studies, the safety leadership role of managers has significant effects on the safety behavior and safety culture of workers. Therefore, in this study, we identified the factors affecting organizational trust, which are known to be prerequisites for building a safety culture, and sought ways to enhance organizational trust. In this study, measurement data were collected using a self-report questionnaire. A total of 4,373 copies were distributed to workers and managers of business partners who are highly likely to be exposed to occupational injuries, and 3,873 copies were used as final data for analysis, excluding insincere responses and non-responses. As a result of the study, safety leadership was found to have a positive (+) effect on organizational trust, and communication and motivation moderated the relationship between safety leadership and organizational trust. Therefore, for safety leadership to have a positive effect on organizational trust at construction sites, it is imperative that leadership participation includes communication and motivational efforts.

• Korean Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.48-54
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• 2021

According to the Ministry of Employment and Labor's statistics on occupational fatalities in South Korea, more than half of the fatalities in the past five years have occurred in the construction industry. The stuck-by and caught-in-between accidents associated with construction equipment is the major source of fatalities from construction sites. In order to prevent such accidents in construction sites, the government has spent lots of efforts including proposing the "special law on construction safety" and encouraging the implementation of new technology for accident prevention. However, numerous accidents are still occurred at construction sites and further efforts are still required. In this manner, this study developed a collision prevention technique that can prevent collision between equipment and worker by recognizing location and type of the nearby objects through ultrasound scanning. The study conducted a pilot experiment and the analysis results demonstrate the feasibility of achieving high performance in both object recognition and location estimation. The developed technique will contribute to prevent collision accidents at construction sites and provide the supplemental knowledge on developing automated collision prevention system for construction equipment.

• International conference on construction engineering and project management
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• 2022.06a
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• pp.579-586
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• 2022

Modular building is a fast-growing construction method, mainly due to its ability to drastically reduce the amount of time it takes to construct a building and produce higher-quality buildings at a more consistent rate. However, while modular construction is relatively safer than traditional construction methods, workers are still exposed to hazards that lead to injuries and fatalities, and these hazards could be controlled using emerging smart technologies. Currently, limited information is available at the intersection of modular construction, safety risk, and smart safety technologies. This paper aims to investigate what aspects of modular construction are most dangerous for its workers, highlight specific risks in its processes, and propose ways to utilize smart technologies to mitigate these safety risks. Findings from the archival analysis of accident reports in Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) Fatality and Catastrophe Investigation Summaries indicate that 114 significant injuries were reported between 2002 and 2021, of which 67 were fatalities. About 72% of fatalities occurred during the installation phase, while 57% were caused by crushing and 85% of crash-related incidents were caused by jack failure/slippage. IoT-enabled wearable sensing devices, computer vision, smart safety harness, and Augment and Virtual Reality were identified as potential solutions for mitigating identified safety risks. The present study contributes to knowledge by identifying important safety trends, critical safety risk factors and proposing practical emerging methods for controlling these risks.

• Safety and Health at Work
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.151-165
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• 2019

Background: Despite improvements in safety performance, the number and severity of mining-related injuries remain high and unacceptable, indicating that further reduction can be achieved. This study examines occupational accident statistics of the Ghanaian mining industry and identifies priority areas, warranting intervention measures and further investigations. Methods: A total of 202 fatal and nonfatal injury reports over a 10-year period were obtained from five mines and the Inspectorate Division of the Minerals Commission of Ghana, and they were analyzed. Results: Results of the analyses show that the involvement of mining equipment, the task being performed, the injury type, and the mechanism of injury remain as priorities. For instance, mining equipment was associated with 85% of all injuries and 90% of all fatalities, with mobile equipment, component/part, and hand tools being the leading equipment types. In addition, mechanics/repairmen, truck operators, and laborers were the most affected ones, and the most dangerous activities included maintenance, operating mobile equipment, and clean up/clearing. Conclusion: Results of this analysis will enable authorities of mines to develop targeted interventions to improve their safety performance. To improve the safety of the mines, further research and prevention efforts are recommended.

• Safety and Health at Work
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.461-469
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• 2019

Background: Collisions involving workers and mobile machines continue to be a major concern in underground coal mines. Over the last 30 years, these collisions have resulted in numerous injuries and fatalities. Recently, the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) proposed a rule that would require mines to equip mobile machines with proximity detection systems (PDSs) (systems designed for automated collision avoidance). Even though this regulation has not been enacted, some mines have installed PDSs on their scoops and hauling machines. However, early implementation of PDSs has introduced a variety of safety concerns. Past findings show that workers' trust can affect technology integration and influence unsafe use of automated technologies. Methods: Using a mixed-methods approach, the present study explores the effect that factors such as mine of employment, age, experience, and system type have on workers' trust in PDSs for mobile machines. The study also explores how workers are trained on PDSs and how this training influences trust. Results: The study resulted in three major findings. First, the mine of employment had a significant influence on workers' trust in mobile PDSs. Second, hands-on and classroom training was the most common types of training. Finally, over 70% of workers are trained on the system by the mine compared with 36% trained by the system manufacturer. Conclusion: The influence of workers' mine of employment on trust in PDSs may indicate that practitioners and researchers may need to give the organizational and physical characteristics of each mine careful consideration to ensure safe integration of automated systems.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.35 no.4
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• pp.23-31
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• 2020

In the construction sector, there were 99 fatalities from falls associated with steel tube and system scaffolds for three years from 2016 to 2018 and out of which 27.3 percent (27 workers) were found to have occurred during installing and dismantling procedure. To erect scaffolding which is installed for the work at height, the work platforms are generally installed first and the safety guardrails are installed and vice versa to dismantle. As a result, workers are exposed to the risk of falling because they erect and dismantle scaffolding without guardrails. To minimize the risk of falling, it is necessary to study a new construction method that can erect or dismantle scaffolding while guardrails are installed (called advanced guardrail system). This study analyzed advanced guardrail system in terms of safety regulation, workability and economic efficiency by investigating the domestic situation on the use of scaffolding, reviewing domestic and foreign standards for guardrails and conducting economic feasibility study. The results of this study is expected to greatly contribute to preventing falls in scaffolding installation and dismantlement procedure. As a follow-up study, empirical research is required including physical test of scaffolding with advanced guardrail system and effectiveness analysis after trial applications.

• Journal of Preventive Medicine and Public Health
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• v.24 no.1 s.33
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• pp.45-56
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• 1991

The history of occupational health in Korea s covered the era of the Republic of Korea after the Liberation from the Japanese colonialism. But the number of Korean workers exceeded about 2 millions at the times of liberation in 1945, so that it is expected that many occupational health problems inflicted Korean workers under the Japanese colonialism. The authors reviewed medical literatures, administrative documents, and other available data which were published under the colonial state, and collected things which had reference to the health status of Korean workers. The results were as follows : 1. Nutritional status of Korean workers was supposed to be inferior to that of general population, some students, and poor inhabitants in a remote mountain villages. 2. It was supposed that the constitution of Korean workers was near lower limit of average build of contemporary Koreans. 3. The accidents rate in mines was significantly high but decreasing year after year, and the most important cause of accidents was the fall of roof in the mine. The medical facilities and equipments for miners were supposed to be not sufficient in the mines and workshops. 4. Some occupational disease including silicosis, noise-induced hearing impairment, and decompression disease were known. But, overall incidence or prevalence of these diseases could not be identified. 5. On the whole, the fatalities of acute infectious diseases of Korean workers were higher than those of Japanese inhabitants in Korea and Korean inhabitants. The prevalence of pulmonary tuberculosis of Korean workers was increasing with every passing year. 6. The medical personnels and facilities were so deficient that most Korean workers were out of adequate medical use. We discussed only a part of the health status of Korean workers under the Japanese colonialism, so it would be necessary to have a better grasp of details of occupational health policy and health status in the era of afflicting.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.36 no.3
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• pp.31-39
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• 2021

In Korea, more than half of work-related fatalities have occurred on construction sites. To reduce such occupational accidents, safety inspection by government agencies is essential in construction sites that present a high risk of serious accidents. To address this issue, this study developed risk prediction models of serious accidents in construction sites using five machine learning methods: support vector machine, random forest, XGBoost, LightGBM, and AutoML. To this end, 15 proactive information (e.g., number of stories and period of construction) that are usually available prior to construction were considered and two over-sampling techniques (SMOTE and ADASYN) were used to address the problem of class-imbalanced data. The results showed that all machine learning methods achieved 0.876~0.941 in the F1-score with the adoption of over-sampling techniques. LightGBM with ADASYN yielded the best prediction performance in both the F1-score (0.941) and the area under the ROC curve (0.941). The prediction models revealed four major features: number of stories, period of construction, excavation depth, and height. The prediction models developed in this study can be useful both for government agencies in prioritizing construction sites for safety inspection and for construction companies in establishing pre-construction preventive measures.

• Journal of the Korea Safety Management & Science
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.9-15
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• 2021

The leading source of occupational fatalities is a portable ladder in Korea because it is widely used in industry as work platform. In order to reduce victims, it is necessary to establish preventive measures for the accidents caused by portable ladder. Therefore, this study statistically analyzed injury death by portable ladder for recent 10 years to investigate the accident characteristics. Next, to monitor wearing of safety helmet in real-time while working on a portable ladder, this study developed an object detection model based on the You Only Look Once(YOLO) architecture, which can accurately detect objects within a reasonable time. The model was trained on 6,023 images with/without ladders and safety helmets. The performance of the proposed detection model was 0.795 for F1 score and 0.843 for mean average precision. In addition, the proposed model processed at least 25 frames per second which make the model suitable for real-time application.

• Safety and Health at Work
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.99-103
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• 2022

Background: Firefighters may experience high environmental temperatures or carry out intensive physical tasks, or both, which leads to increased core body temperature and risk of fatalities. Hence there is a need to remotely and non-invasively monitor core body temperature. Methods: Estimated (heart rate algorithm) and actual core body temperature (ingested telemetric pill) measures were collected simultaneously for comparison during training exercises on 44 firefighter volunteers. Results: Prediction of core body temperature varied, with no specific identifiable pattern between the algorithm values and directly measured body core temperatures. Group agreement of Lin's Concordance of 0.74 (95% Upper 0.75, lower CI 0.73), was deemed poor. Conclusion: From individual agreement data Lin's Concordance was variable (Min 0.11, CI 0.13-0.01; Max 0.83, CI 0.86-0.80), indicating that the heart rate algorithm approach was not suitable for core body temperature monitoring in this population group, especially at the higher more critical core body temperatures seen.