Innovative design: Are there opportunities to improve worker health and safety and
building safety outcomes through inherently safer design that reduces risk through
the building life cycle from construction through occupation and refurbishment to
demolition?

Background

To enable strategic and transformative advances in health and safety across the diverse construction sector through technology and innovation and the new opportunities and risks arising from it. To underpin construction and building safety regulatory regimes with evidence-based approaches and enable effective oversight across the whole built environment. To inform standards and guidance development to improve the safety and standard of buildings and develop effective strategies to measure and build competence across the construction and building safety sectors. To ensure that our approach to regulating chemicals and microbial control agents: is effective, efficient and agile, reflecting current and developing scientific understanding and technical knowledge; reinforces our position as an internationally influential regulator; and enables society to derive the benefits of access to safe and sustainable use of chemicals; and ensure there is no harm to workers, bystanders and consumers or unacceptable effects on the environment.

Next steps

Get in touch with hsecsa@hse.gov.uk

Source

This question was published as part of the set of ARIs in this document:

HS Es Areas of Research Interest ARI 2023

Related UKRI funded projects


  • IMPROVING DESIGN FOR SAFETY: A WEB-BASED DESIGN FOR SAFETY CAPABILITY MATURITY INDICATOR (DFS-CMI) TOOL FOR THE CONSTRUCTION SECTOR

    The global construction sector is estimated to account for 100,000 fatalities annually and about 30-40% of all fatal occupational injuries. In the UK, although the construction sector accounts for only approximately 5% o...

    Funded by: EPSRC

    Lead research organisation: University of Manchester

    Why might this be relevant?

    The project focuses on improving worker health and safety through design for safety (DfS) in the construction sector, which directly addresses the question.

  • AI-Enabled Bio-Safety Assessment Tool for Sustainable Building Design in Pandemic Conditions.

    At this time not only is there a global pandemic for the novel coronavirus COVID-19, at time of writing this application there is the 11th outbreak of Ebola being fought in Africa, Europe is recovering from a 3-year outb...

    Funded by: Innovate UK

    Lead research organisation: DATA INNOVATION.AI LTD

  • Connected Worker Disease Prevention for Construction Sector

    This project will develop an Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) software tool for construction workers that will for the first-time prevent disease by accurately calculating individual workers exposure to three key con...

    Funded by: Innovate UK

    Lead research organisation: EARTEX LTD

    Why might this be relevant?

    The project focuses on preventing disease in construction workers by calculating exposure to key hazards, which partially addresses the question about improving worker health and safety through safer design.

  • Wearable Technology for Noise, Dust, Vibration Monitoring to Reduce Health Costs in Construction

    Construction is considered a dangerous industry but whilst the death rate from falls and machinery has been reducing, workers are still 100 times more likely to die from ill health than an accident in the construction se...

    Funded by: Innovate UK

    Lead research organisation: IDEAL INDUSTRIES LIMITED

    Why might this be relevant?

    The project focuses on using wearable technology for monitoring health hazards in construction, aligning with the goal of improving worker health and safety outcomes through innovative design.

  • AI-Enabled Design Diagnostics and Optimisation System for Mould Prevention (AI-DOMP)

    The aftermath of the tragic death of Awaab Ishak because of prolonged exposure to mould in Rochdale Boroughwide Housing flats in 2020 increases the level of awareness of the health risks posed by mould. At the time, heal...

    Funded by: Innovate UK

    Lead research organisation: BUILDECO LTD

  • Resilience funding for enabling safer and more efficient construction through video analytics and machine learning

    **Introduction** The COVID-19 contingency has highlighted the urgent need for site monitoring systems that enable measuring relative distances, effectively and accurately, among workers and plant equipment to ensure saf...

    Funded by: Innovate UK

    Lead research organisation: ZEST CONSULT LTD

  • Health Effects of Modern Airtight Construction: Follow-on funding

    The way that buildings have been designed and constructed has changed rapidly in recent years, driven to a significant extent by the need to meet challenges of climate change and energy costs, but also to reduce costs an...

    Funded by: AHRC

    Lead research organisation: University of Strathclyde

Similar ARIs from other organisations