Role of IoT in transforming a hazardous construction site into a safe and efficient workplace

What comes to your mind when we talk about a construction site? Lots of materials, equipment, heavy machinery, workers, right! Now, imagine how workers have been working at construction areas all these years without proper safety measures, material handling, and communication, leading to accidents at the site, causing delays, reducing productivity, and so on.

How about all of these getting smoother, integrated and connected?

The world seems to have overcome the past era and found a powerful advanced tool named Internet of Things (IoT). This tool improves the safety of workers, making them more secure, modern, equipped, and efficient.

Industry solutions to ensure safety at construction sites

Safety is paramount – injury due to falls, electrocution, and collisions are the most common accidents that occur at the construction site. IoT is now being used in the form of below solutions to address these challenges.

A. Connected Worker

IoT ensures construction workers safety through wearables that track and provide constant information about the body and health parameters. It triggers alerts in case of approaching dangerous/hazardous zone, notifies any sudden changes to the surrounding environment, which helps site managers to manage labor productivity better.

Organizations are embracing IoT technology as it captures a significant amount of data generated by the devices providing newer insights to them. For instance, IoT gives a peek into the worker's behaviour that enables organizations to run safety campaigns targeting to that specific analysis. This will educate the workers to see real value from the tasks they are assigned to, thereby increasing the effectiveness of the campaign and improve safety.

B. Connected Equipment

Devices and sensors installed on construction equipment help managers to track and monitor the location of the fleet through GPS, identify their usage patterns, idle time, and so on, avoid misuse, theft, or fuel pilferage, and effectively plan and schedule a job based on ever-changing variables at the site. The track and trace mechanism has contributed immensely, and issues of misplaced items are nearly brought to ZERO compared to previous years that in turn, help organizations save associated costs.

Organizations are now opting for anti-collision systems that provide real-time notifications to the operator to stop moving further if the equipment comes closer to each other to avoid a collision. Various threshold limits and equipment auto stop can be introduced remotely by the site manager/office if the operator ignores early warnings. This has drastically reduced the unfortunate incidents at the site, thereby boosting efficiency.

Damaged equipment repair is expensive, and the repair work can come to a halt if the replacement parts are unavailable. Updates on run-time of an equipment and notifications on preventive maintenance provide fault part information that helps site managers to reduce dependency and avoid delays and shutdown due to machinery failure at the construction site. Usage of the anti-collision system at the construction site results in higher productivity and avoids schedule overrun.

Connected ecosystem bridges the gap with the real environment. The data points and real-time analytics helps the site managers to understand what is happening on the ground. It aid managers to take quick decisions preventing mishaps and reducing injuries. IoT is a boon to the construction industry as it reduces compensation costs, optimizes the assets, promotes worker safety and improves survivability.

About the author

Sajal Karanwal

Managing Consultant - IoT & Digital Solutions, Engineering & Construction, Wipro Limited

Sajal is part of the core group of E&C vertical that caters to Engineering Construction sector, Airports and Smart Cities. He has more than 12 years of experience in consulting & solution sales of IoT & digital solutions. He is responsible to evangelizing & building solutions, create an ecosystem to deliver them to business to derive efficiency and agility in operations

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