Workers in a construction site may be exposed to various hazardous substances, for instance, asbestos, lead, silica dust, organic solvents. They may also be distracted by noise and vibration. Collapse and electricity leakage may lead to fatal accidents.
From Work Injury Source, fatalities in the construction industry are double of wholesale trade and triple of professional and business services. Although most of the building laborers have the consciousness to wear proper personal protective equipment (PPE), unfortunate accidents may still happen due to the unlimited and countless variables in construction sites.
Today our main focus will be the physical injury and material shortage.
If you want more about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) helps the construction industry, click here.
How do you solve it?
To analyze the video footage of construction sites, computer vision in artificial intelligence (AI) can surely help you identify the potential threats to resources and physical injury.
1. Monitoring personal protective equipment (PPE) compliance
Will the workers wear PPE? No one really knows. Monitoring by human naked eyes will never be the best method to eliminate the accident rate in construction sites as you can never promise 100% accuracy and attention.
By computer vision, employee’s safety equipment is being monitored. More importantly, alarms are set out simultaneously to construction site workers. With an email sent together to the manager and the captured footage from the camera on site which is being stored on the cloud, further analysis and improvement can be done by the sites and will definitely reduce the chance of injury.
In a typical case in Hong Kong in 2009, 371 people got injured in the construction industry, with an over 130% increase to 860 in 2018. After applying 24/7 Artificial Intelligence (AI) in future work, it can definitely detect potential and upcoming dangerous events with a reduction of over 50% of the accident rate. [Scopus databases]
2. Tracking material
Computer vision can track the placing and amount of building materials stored on the construction site. Also, alerts will be given when the quantity of material is running low.
Besides, this can increase efficiency as the human resource and time that is used to monitor the materials can be reduced and used for other production stages. Over 70% of construction projects have been delayed due to miscalculation and uncontrolled variables, after applying Artificial Intelligence (AI), the chance of delay will be 80% eliminated.
3. Setting up a danger zone
Artificial intelligence (AI) users can draw their own danger zones in the construction sites and under the cranes. The camera will monitor the zone, with the use of computer vision and face recognition, people who enter the improper zone will be identified automatically.
Another advantage of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the lower cost compared to human wage, normally a monthly worker wage is over 10 thousand, with Artificial Intelligence (AI) replacing the human source, the cost and time from using manpower and project procrastination will be reduced.