A University of Dayton researcher, with $1.41 million from the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation, is striving to make work zones safer with additional "eyes" and "ears" to improve situational awareness and early warning of hazards.
Hui "Jack" Wang, UD associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and engineering mechanics, will work with researchers at Case Western Reserve University and the University of Cincinnati plus industry partners VigiLife and Ulliman Schutte Construction on the project to develop an on-site network of cameras and sound sensors on equipment and workers to pinpoint how close equipment, workers and hazards are to each other.
In 2022, work zone crashes in the United States resulted in 891 fatalities and 37,701 injuries of workers and occupants of vehicles. Between 2018 and 2022, Ohio's highway work zones accounted for 106 traffic fatalities of workers and occupants of vehicles, according to Wang.
“Work zones are inherently dynamic and hazardous environments, often relying heavily on visual observation for hazard detection. However, visual cues can become unreliable due to obstructions, adverse weather and poor lighting conditions, which limit the effectiveness of current safety measures. A system like this bridges the gap — if you can’t see it, you can hear it," Wang said. "Combining audio and visual inputs gives the project manager another powerful situational awareness tool.”
The system will communicate with workers who will be wearing earbuds.
"Noises have different patterns. A dump truck has a different sound pattern than an excavator," Wang said. "The system will identify sounds and let workers closest to the dump trunk know it's time to watch out."
If equipment is too quiet or not distinctive from other sounds, the cameras take over, Wang added.
Wang said the researchers hope to build a live map of hazards for site managers into the system.
UD’s team will include Wang plus two to three doctoral researchers and a pair of post-doctoral researchers. They’ll develop computer models of work zones in the University of Dayton School of Engineering's Greg and Annie Stevens Intelligent Infrastructure Engineering Lab, which boasts a 300-square-foot wrap-around virtual-reality system, high-precision motion tracking and multi-user eye-tracking headsets. Users can walk through life-size virtual job sites, interact with equipment and analyze real-time data to refine designs before implementation. The next step will be testing in a closed, monitored working environment to verify effectiveness and reliability. Then the team will test the system on live job sites.
"We are grateful for the support of VigiLife and Ulliman Schutte Construction, which will enable system testing on live job sites," UD School of Engineering Dean Gül Kremer said. "This project is an excellent example of a university-industry collaboration to positively impact engineering practice."
For more information or interviews, contact Shawn Robinson, University of Dayton associate director of news and communications at srobinson1@udayton.edu.