Evaluating the effects of safety incentives on worker safety behavior control through image-based activity classification.

Introduction: Construction worker safety remains a major concern even as task automation increases. Although safety incentives have been introduced to encourage safety compliance, it is still difficult to accurately measure the effectiveness of these measures. A simple count of accident rates and lower numbers do not necessarily mean that workers are properly complying with safety regulations. To address this problem, this study proposes an image-based approach to monitor moment-by-moment worker safety behavior and evaluate the effects of different safety incentive scenarios. Methods: By capturing workers' safety behaviors using a model integrated with OpenPose and spatiotemporal graph convolutional network, this study evaluated the effects of safety-incentive scenarios on workers' compliance with rules while on the job. The safety incentive scenarios in this study were designed as 1) varying the type (i.e., providing rewards and penalties) of incentives and 2) varying the frequency of feedback about ones' own compliance status during tasks. The effects of the scenarios were compared to the average compliance rates of three safety regulations (i.e., personal protective equipment self-monitoring hazard avoidance, and arranging the safety hook) for each scenario. Results: The results show that 1) rewarding a good-compliance is more effective when there is no feedback on compliance status, and 2) penalizing non-compliance is more effective when there are three feedbacks during the tasks. Discussion: This study provides a more accurate assessment of safety incentives and their effectiveness by focusing on safe behaviors to promote safety compliance among construction workers.