A review of workspace challenges and wearable solutions in railroads and construction

Railroad environments are generally considered to be dangerous workplace environments. The types of risks encountered there are comparable to the construction industry, ranking among the highest in workplace fatalities. However, these two industries also employ millions of people and thus safety has always been a major concern to both industries. These efforts, by industry and academia, are now starting to take an approach to collect safety related data for further analysis to comprehensively improve worker safety. Recent advances in wearable devices have greatly enhanced safety and data analytics by providing workers an advanced layered protection and also acquiring real-time incident data. In this paper we survey the challenges in these work environments to employee safety as well as wearable solutions currently designed to detect risks and alert workers of these situations. We aim to determine the current state of the art technologies in Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN), capable of addressing work environment challenges in railyards. Similarly, wearable solutions in the construction industry are evaluated for their feasibility to protect railyard workers.