Wearable device based physical and mental stress monitoring for construction workers

Construction is considered as one of the most hazardous industry around the globe and consequently workers health and safety records cast an overly gloomy picture with high turnover rates. A major underlying risk factor is physically and mentally demanding nature of the construction tasks. Mental and physical stress are one of the most common health related issues seen in the construction workers. Short and long-term exposure of physical and mental stress could lead to many undesirable consequences such as musculoskeletal disorders, increase in errors and mistakes, elevated chances of accidents and more serious systemic illnesses such as cardiovascular disorders, stroke, depression, and other mental health illness. Besides, with rapidly ageing construction workforce in many developed countries, efforts are underway to make the current workforce more sustainable. Given that aged workers are more susceptible to ill-effects of physical and mental stress, the need to better comprehend, monitor and manage physical and mental stress is unprecedented. Although previously there have been attempts to measure and quantify mental and physical stress separately for construction workers, there is still a need of an to simultaneously monitor mental and physical stress of construction workers. Importantly, given that typically construction workers are usually concurrently exposed to both mental and physical stress, and countering their detrimental effects requires simultaneous monitoring of both mental and physical stress. Thus, the purpose of this project is to monitor stress using wearable sensors and machine-learning-based models. A lab experiment will be conducted to validate evaluate the aforementioned method. Overall, this project will help to develop a feasible non-invasive tool for combined physical and mental stress monitoring of the construction workers, which will help construction safety management practitioners to reduce physical and mental stress and prevent other systemic illnesses resulting from stress.