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 technologies use different ways of communicating yet were all able to demonstrate better HSE outcomes when being tested.

The first technology was an Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) tracking system. The technology uses active wearables to identify known users and report their location to a digital twin. This technology supports social distancing and allows reporting that can be used to locate people quickly.

This was combined with PPE that is tagged with low-cost passive RFID tags. They are capable of automatically detecting PPE and associates it to the user in a digital twin as each user logs in. This ensures that each person onsite or in the manufacturing facility is wearing the correct PPE for the work being undertaken.

The third technology, an array of low-cost AI enabled cameras, use machine vision detection to identify users that have not signed in as non-working site visitors and therefore who aren’t signed up to HSE documentation needed for work zones. These people shouldn’t be entering working areas but do need to wear mandatory PPE. By using the AI cameras these visitors can also be monitored, ensuring that they stay within approved areas.

The system of integrated solutions enables site managers to review a site from anywhere in the world using an internet connection. It gives them the ability to establish who is currently onsite and exactly where they are, with an accuracy of 15cm.

The system also supports the digital creation of work zones that can include the relevant HSE requirements including PPE, skills, and documentation. This means that if someone entered those work zones without having achieved the relevant requirements, audible alarms can sound, allowing for proactive rather than reactive HSE management.

The system also allows incidents to be automatically logged to generate near miss reporting to support the Heinrich pyramid approach to HSE management. In the future, the AI cameras can be trained to automatically detect near misses around the main accident categories such as slips, trips and falls, falls from height, and people being struck by moving or falling objects. There is even the possibility to automatically observe the potential for these accidents before they happen.

Digital technologies are being integrated into all elements of construction and manufacturing to support greater outputs and outcomes for businesses. This utilisation of technology in a HSE capacity is another example of digital engineering supporting the evolution of the sector.