Integrating safety culture into OSH risk mitigation via information technologies

The occupational safety and health (OSH) risk management continues to be a key topic for worldwide industries, especially in the construction industry. Most of prior technologies were used to directly but passively impact safe working engineering in a technical way. However, technologies may also indirectly but actively influence workers’ safe performance in a managerial way. This research aimed to examine this severe safety problem in the construction industry, and taking which as an example, prevention measures for OSH risk mitigation are discussed. The analyses find that large portion of the OSH fatalities and injuries are related to workers’ unsafe acts and lack of awareness on the OSH hazards. The lack of effectiveness was ascribed the OSH training content as well as the one-off nature of construction industry. An innovative approach is proposed, which integrates the safety culture into the OSH risk mitigation via the application of cutting-edge information technologies. Particularly, a virtual reality-based pilot application which links the safety culture and risk mitigation is demonstrated