Changbum Ryan Ahn, Ph.D., and Namgyun Kim
Texas A & M University
College Station, Texas
Risk habituation makes construction workers be unable to properly perceive and respond to hazards in construction sites. Risk habituation is a decline of response to frequent stimuli or a decrease in the level of perceived risk resulted from engaging in unsafe behaviors many times without injuries or accidents. Evidence shows that after an accident experience, workers’ perceived risk level would increase. However, since workers cannot be exposed to actual hazardous situations, risk habituation is hard to analyze and prevent in the real world.
The aim of this study is evaluating the validity of a virtual reality model as an experimental tool to identify the relationship between accident experience and workers’ risk habituation tendency. To this end, this study proposes the approach simulating virtual accident scenes that may arise from workers’ unsafe behavior in road construction sites.
The virtual road construction environment which enables subjects to engage in repeated hazardous situations is developed. A pilot laboratory experiment was conducted to exploit the validity of the developed VR model. While playing the VR model, subjects who frequently showed unsafe behaviors (e.g., working in close proximity to heavy construction equipment and ignoring warning alarms) were struck by road construction equipment. A week after the subjects were asked to return to participate in the same experiment again. Physical and physiological responses of subjects to stimuli in the hazardous working environment were observed and analyzed.
The results indicated that an accident experience in VE has a correlation with the workers’ risk habituation. The risk habituation tendency of the group exposed to the virtual accident was less than the group without the virtual accident experience. The outcomes of this research will lay the foundation for further study to employ a virtual reality as an experimental tool to understand workers’ risk habituation in construction sites.
Keywords: Construction safety, Risk habituation, Virtual reality, Accident effect