Cognitive Impact of Wearing an Exoskeleton on Hazard Identification Performance of Construction Workers
Publication: Computing in Civil Engineering 2023
ABSTRACT
Exoskeleton has been introduced as one of the effective ergonomic intervention strategies in the construction industry for reducing the physical burden of workers often exposed to heavy lifting and repetitive work. While extensive research has investigated the potential of the exoskeleton in site for reducing muscle fatigue, little is known regarding its effect on cognitive performance such as attention. Considering that attention plays a critical role in recognizing hazards in construction sites and incident involvement, this study aims to address this knowledge gap by determining the impact of wearing an exoskeleton on the hazard identification performance of construction workers. To achieve this objective, the research team has designed an experiment in which participants identify construction hazards before and after conducting repetitive manual material handling with and without an exoskeleton. In addition, functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) was used to measure participants’ visual and cognitive processes during the experiment. The data was collected from 12 participants and analyzed through a permutation analysis to determine the differences between hazard identification performance with and without the exoskeleton. The result indicates that exoskeletons tend to positively affect the attentional distribution of workers with lower accuracy for the number of hazards identified. The findings demonstrate the influence of wearing an exoskeleton on the cognitive performance of workers and highlight the need for further research to reduce this effect.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Computing in Civil Engineering 2023
Pages: 357 - 365
History
Published online: Jan 25, 2024
ASCE Technical Topics:
- Business management
- Construction engineering
- Construction management
- Construction materials
- Construction sites
- Disaster risk management
- Disasters and hazards
- Employment
- Engineering materials (by type)
- Geotechnical engineering
- Geotechnical investigation
- Hazardous substances
- Labor
- Man-made disasters
- Materials engineering
- Occupational safety
- Personnel management
- Practice and Profession
- Public administration
- Public health and safety
- Risk management
- Safety
- Site investigation
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