Envision Center collaboration aims to make construction work safer
New technology developed by the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing’s Envision Center in collaboration with a Purdue professor aims to make construction environments safer by helping workers better assess risk and avoid judgment errors.
Sogand Hasanzadeh, assistant professor of construction engineering and management and civil engineering, studies how construction workers change their risk-taking behavior under different task stressor such as time pressure, and environmental stressors such as heat stress.
“We can’t ask people to go on the roof of a two-story building without protection,” explains Hasanzadeh. “We were looking for a visualization that would allow us to provide the same sense of presence of being on the roof and allow them to safely install shingles.”
Enter the Envision Center, which worked with Hasanzadeh’s team to use extended reality (using Varjo XR) to develop a partially virtual environment that allows the user to stand on a sloped piece of the actual roof, which is located on the ground and believe they’re working two stories up. The worker can selectively see their own body and the shingles on the roof they’re installing, but not the rest of the room, where environmental modalities like wind, heat and humidity of a hot summer day, and noise from the suburban area were simulated.
Hasanzadeh, her doctoral student, Shiva Pooladvand, and undergraduate research assistants then use devices such as eye trackers embedded in the Varjo XR headset, medical wristbands collecting heart rate and emotional responses, and fNIRS neuroimaging caps for monitoring the brain’s oxygen concentration to examine how workers are psychophysiologically reacting to the environment.
The project's ultimate goal is to save thousands of lives and billions of dollars of costs by avoiding falls, near misses, and other resulting incidents/injuries in the construction industries.
Hasanzadeh was familiar with the Envision Center after collaborating on a previous proposal about electrical safety, and she reached out to them during the proposal phase of this project. After she was awarded funding from the National Science Foundation (award # 2049711), the extended reality environment came to life.
“It was a wonderful experience working with the Envision Center,” says Hasanzadeh, who plans to continue her collaboration with the Center. “It was also a great learning opportunity for our students.”
For more information about working with the Envision Center, contact envision@purdue.edu.