Danger prediction by modern technology : The role of wearable technology in improving workers’ situational awareness in hazardous industries

Sammanfattning: The health and safety of workers is critically important to all companies, especially those operating in hazardous environments.  Companies typically rely on an array of personal protective equipment to help ensure the safety of their workers, however as technology evolves, a new generation of devices are helping revolutionize the industry.  Wearable technology is now becoming commonplace in both our personal and professional lives.    This study focused on understanding the use of, and attitude towards, various wearable technologies by workers in hazardous environments.  It also explored the change in perception within the workers as these technologies were leveraged and made recommendations for improvement in the future.   A qualitive methodology was applied to understand the people, social, and cultural context.  Participants from industry were interviewed in an inductive and iterative manner, extracting data with an emphasis on the narrative.  Thematic analysis was then utilized to distill the data into Codes, Categories, and ultimately Concepts.   While it became evident that workers had limited personal experience with wearable technology outside of the workplace, they all used it in some manner during their work.  The use of wearable technology was largely motivated by policies and procedures imposed by the companies.  Interestingly, the workers did have an expectation that the user of these devices had a positive impact on their overall safety.  Somewhat surprisingly, the outlook on the future of the technology was not very positive.  There are several opportunities for improvement both to design and implementation of safety related wearable technology, as well as a desire to better leverage artificial intelligence and augmented reality.   Most companies utilize some level of wearable technology to assist in keeping their workers safe.  How workers utilize wearable technology to identify dangerous locations and situations varies greatly from organization to organization, but also between individual workers within any organization.  Although the use of wearable technology within the workplace has been demonstrated to improve safety, the primary motivator for its use is the fact that organization mandate their staff to compliance through policies and standard operating processes. Despite the fact that personal safety should be of utmost importance to any worker, they appear to be so unmotivated to actually utilize the technology available to them that it must be made mandatory through policy.  Within this environment, it becomes very difficult for workers to consider how wearable technology capabilities can be improved in regard to safety-related situational awareness.