60% of construction contractors lack digital safety systems, impacting response times and worker safety. Twiceme Technology's survey highlights the importance of implementing smart PPE technology to improve safety protocols and information access on construction sites.
Photo courtesy of Twiceme
Twiceme Technology, a Swedish company dedicated to revolutionizing safety solutions, revealed the findings of its 2024 Construction Safety Survey.
In the industrial market survey of 500 construction contractors and 390 safety managers/directors, the data revealed that while 79 percent of safety managers have digital systems to track critical safety information and personal protective equipment (PPE) health, only 40 percent of contractors surveyed noted they have digital access to this information, too.
Digital safety technologies have served a vital role in the outdoor sports industry for quite some time, and the construction industry is now beginning to follow suit. Digital technologies embedded within PPE can increase efficiency, decrease deficiencies in information, and empower the wearer and issuer to make the workplace safer by more quickly alerting, locating, and identifying injured persons. It is critical to have information about workplace certifications, PPE equipment health and emergency information about a contractor available at the fingertips of those at a job site.
Digital technologies can make an immense difference in response times when an incident occurs.
Construction sites can be dangerous, and 69 percent of contractors surveyed noted that they or a coworker had experienced a serious accident at a job site. Of this group, 54 percent said that the first person to respond on site did not have relevant health information about the injured person, which could help accelerate and improve the first-aid process. Also, 45 percent of this group were not adequately trained to provide preliminary help to an injured worker in the moments before first responders were on the scene.
"Safety managers are doing a great job with digital safety processes, but there is a critical gap when this information does not reach the workers," said Christian Connolly, CEO, Twiceme. "Distributing smart PPE can help solve this issue. Investing in PPE like safety helmets and harnesses that have Twiceme-enabled NFC chips embedded within revolutionizes how information is shared and accessed, thus having a positive impact on how management and contractors can respond and act in emergency scenarios."
When safety managers were prompted to rank features of an ideal safety management system, the large majority marked the following components to be valuable to extremely valuable:
- Get alerts for overdue inspections and maintenance tasks for PPE (96 percent).
- Get real-time reports on safety compliance issues and incidents (96 percent).
- Access to real-time insights into worker attendance and location at job sites (96 percent).
- Inspect and receive automatic reminders when workers' certifications near expiration (91 percent).
- Keep track of their workers' PPE to reduce missing or lost equipment (90 percent).
- Access to paperless inspection and filing of required inspections per OSHA guidelines (88 percent).
The value of such features is clear: more than 88 percent of survey managers said they would be willing to pay $15 or more for helmets or other PPE gear for their organization if they included a safety management system that tracks work-related documents, equipment expiration dates, emergency response and reporting tools.
"As general contractors and other industrial organizations across the U.S. transition from hard hats to safety helmets or plan to invest in other job site PPE, such as fall protection, they should also look at embedded digital technologies as a top priority," added Connolly.
For more information, visit www.twiceme.com.
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