Measuring Construction Workers’ Real-Time Situation Awareness Using Mobile Eye-Tracking

Eye-tracking technology is an emerging methodology that has the potential to transform current practices in measuring workers’ situation awareness (SA). Since eye movements are assumed to indicate where a worker’s attention is directed, tracking such movements provides a practical way to measure workers’ attention and comprehension of construction hazards. Considering this technology’s potential applications, some researchers have started to use remote eye trackers to investigate workers’ abilities to identify hazards; however, these studies lack process capabilities to assess real-time situation awareness. In order to address this limitation, the main objective of this study is to use a mobile eye-tracker to measure workers’ SA in different scenarios within a real-world construction site. Using direct measures of SA (eye tracking) in parallel with subjective SA measures, this research resulted in some interesting associations between these two types of SA measurements. It also found that situation awareness and visual attention allocations of workers vary significantly according to the scenario’s workload, the state of the area of interest, and the workers’ level of experience. Results from this study may help to identify workers with lower SA and therefore, pinpoint opportunities to provide proactive training and develop guidelines for workers that will reduce human error and accidents in construction sites. Subsequently, this approach can measure the same workers’ SA level after training to determine whether their SA improved.