Measurement of Construction Workers' Feeling by Virtual Environment (VE) Technology for Guardrail Design in High-Rise Building Construction Projects

Abstract

According to the information of accidents, fall from height makes the highest death of construction workers. Nowadays, the design standards of fall protection system, e.g., guardrail have not considered workers’ feelings. However, workers’ feelings such as safety feeling and convenient feeling may affect safety and productivity of construction workers. The objective of this paper is to propose a construction workers’ feeling measurement by feeling measurement tools used for guardrail design in high-rise building construction projects. The three types of the tool were developed for construction workers’ feeling measurement, such as 2-D of construction project environment included dimension and characteristics of guardrails 2-D pictures with dimension of guardrails related to workers’ dimension, and Virtual Reality (VR) models run in Virtual Environment (VE) equipment called CAVE. The standard deviation (S.D.) and Coefficient of Variation (C.V.) of workers’ feelings were used to indicate the performance of workers’ feeling measurement tools. Moreover, in the case study, the most effective tool was applied to measure the workers’ feelings in order to design the guardrail by considering not only cost of guardrail, but also construction workers’ feelings. The suitable guardrail was analyzed by Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method. The results of construction workers’ feeling measurement by the three types of the tool showed that for guardrail design, workers’ feeling measurement by VR models in CAVE is the most effective tool compared with others. From the result of the case study, it showed that the suitable types of guardrail can be designed by considering both cost of guardrail and construction workers’ feelings.