ConstructionWorX DIGITAL
Digital twinning your workforce - are digital technologies the key to unlocking health and safety practices in the construction sector? The construction sector has made huge strides in improving health and safety onsite, however, despite advancements there is still a fatality on an average of every 9 days. Here we report on the work of the Manufacturing Technology Centre in signposting digital solutions. In addition to fatalities, injuries on construction sites and work-related ill health currently costs the construction and infrastructure sector around £1.2 billion per year in lost productivity, equalling 8% of the total losses across all industries. Once you add injuries to this, such as musculoskeletal disorders which are around double the average across all other industries, the costs soon add up. The Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC) in Coventry has been working to demonstrate how digital technologies can be integrated into health and safety practices to reduce both accidents and injuries on construction sites or in manufacturing environments. Much of the construction industry HSE management processes are still paper based. With the sector moving in favour of offsite manufacturing, there is an opportunity to implement some of the latest technology and best practices from the manufacturing sector to help
address these challenges. On this basis, the MTC set out on a mission to explore and establish the art-of-the-possible with regards to digital HSE management. The MTC set out to prove to companies that the technology to enforce the use of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and enable accurate worker tracking exists and can be deployed onsite or in their factory immediately. These technologies also enable integrated digital solutions to be further developed to connect risk assessments, method statements, safe systems of work, skills matrices to automate HSE compliance tracking, and near miss reporting. By integrating three different tracking technologies to produce one holistic system, the MTC were able to demonstrate how multiple different technologies can be used to dynamically enforce health and safety guidelines related to PPE in a workshop or factory setting. The
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