BIM-Enhanced Noise Hazard Training: A Pilot Study

Noise induced hearing loss (NIHL) has been a pervasive problem for all construction trades, yet construction workers still lack sufficient knowledge concerning hazardous occupational noise. Due to the nature of invisibility itself, noise exposure is hard to be intuitively perceived through traditional training methods to improve workers’ perception of noise hazards, such as, short verbal and written instructions, during employee orientation and site safety meeting. With an increasing adoption of advanced information technology in construction industry, building information modeling (BIM) visualization-enhanced safety training has been studied to raise occupational safety awareness in an intuition way. During training process, trainees’ level of attentiveness throughout instruction is generally associated with their learning efficacy. However, little study has been done to quantitatively evaluate the level of attentiveness during BIM-enhanced safety training for occupational awareness improvement. Therefore, this research proposed a quantitative method to validate the level of attentiveness using BIM-enhanced noise exposure training to enhance workers’ noise awareness through monitoring their neuropsychological activities. The brain activation patterns of the test subjects were collected and compared between the traditional text-based and auditory-based, and the BIM-enhanced training. The preliminary results illustrated that the BIM-enhanced training yielded higher level of attentiveness than other training methods, which could successfully prove its capability of promoting workers’ awareness of workspace noise hazard.