Smart Vests Have Construction Workers' Safety at Heart

Heat stress is a growing safety concern in the building industry and now an innovative smart vest has been developed to monitor the health of construction workers in real time.Developed at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, the vest uses sensors to measure a worker's body temperature and heart rate and sends the data wirelessly to a smartphone app, which instantly alerts users to any anomalies. The innovation comes amid concern at the growing number of heat-related accidents on construction sites.And it follows a NASA climate report warning that temperatures over the past decade have been the warmest in more than a century. Vice-Chancellor's Research Fellow in RMIT's School of Property, Construction and Project Management, Dr Ruwini Edirisinghe has been working on the smart vest concept for more than a year. She devised her heat stress vest as part of her research in to improving worker safety. National and international regulatory bodies such as SafeWork in Australia, The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSH) in the USA and Health and Safety Executive (HSE) in the UK are increasingly recognising heat stress hazards in the construction industry. Workers in building and construction are at higher risk of death or injury than those in many other occupations, with figures from SafeWork Australia showing the industry accounted for 12 per cent of the nation's work-related fatalities in 2013-14. But other workers are also exposed to hot conditions on the job, including bakers, fire-fighters, welders, miners, boiler room workers, chefs, farmers, gardeners and foundry operators. The signs and symptoms of heat illness can include feeling sick, nauseous, dizzy or weak. Victims can become clumsy, collapse, suffer convulsions and die. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-03-smart-vests-workers-safety-heart.html#jCpS