Construction is also a high-risk industry. While construction workers make up only 6 percent of the U.S. labor force, they make up approximately 20 percent of worker deaths. For example, more than 1,000 construction workers died on the job in 2020.
Construction workers sustain head and other types of injuries from various accidents, including height-related accidents, where workers fall from ladders or are struck by falling objects; demolition accidents, where workers are injured by explosives, trips and falls, fires and explosions; and crane and forklift accidents.
Serious construction injuries cost the United States $5 billion annually in health care, lost income, reduction quality of life and lost production—not to mention $2.5 billion annually for worker compensation claims.
According to Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), construction companies save $4 to $6 for every $1 invested in safety programs. Because most construction accidents cause head injuries, wearing a hard hat is essential for preventing injury and is now required by OSHA.
Still, many workers do not wear the safety hats that their employers must provide. They may feel they are too hot, too heavy, too bulky, too loose, too ugly, too uncomfortable … or all of the above. Even when they are required to wear hard hats, workers often take off the hats as soon as their manager is not watching. Therefore, companies can find themselves in the no-win situation of spending a lot of resources to make sure their workers wear hard hats consistently or facing the expensive consequences of worker injuries.
A technology recently developed by AMC Bridge will free construction businesses from this conundrum.
Ukraine-based AMC Bridge has been a leading service provider of solutions for CAD, CAE, CAM, PDM, BIM and PLM applications since 1999. The company’s expertise is in developing commercial software products and custom solutions for the engineering market on a variety of platforms, including desktop, web, mobile and cloud.
Despite the war going on in the country, AMC Bridge has somehow managed to stay operational. The company has developed Construction Safety—Hard-hat Detector, a new web-based technology demonstration that applies machine learning to ensure safety on construction sites. Using machine learning and image recognition techniques of the TensorFlow open-source software library, Construction Safety—Hard-hat Detector analyzes the images extracted from an uploaded surveillance video and identifies workers who are not wearing hard hats on a construction site. Once the video file is processed, managers can view snapshots of workers who were detected not wearing hard hats or download the snapshots locally.
To ensure maximum flexibility and convenience, the functionality of Construction Safety—Hard-hat Detector is seamlessly connected to either Google Drive, Dropbox, or MEGA online storage. Images can then be downloaded to perform video analysis.
The Construction Safety—Hard-hat Detector technology offers multiple benefits. For example, managers no longer need to be on-site to ensure that workers are wearing hard hats because they can perform this task remotely. In addition, they may be able to monitor more workers or even workers at more than one site at a time. As a result, a business can ensure more continuous and consistent hard-hat wearing by more workers and achieve this goal with less labor and at lower costs.
Readers interested in seeing the current functionality of the Construction Safety—Hard-hat Detector technology demonstration can watch a short demo video here.