UNIVERSITY OF CEBU

SYNTHESIS # 1

ENGR. JOHN ROLAND ARCALLANA

Instructor

Rhastee P. Toroy
Student
The Role Of Technology Mitigating Hazard Identification, Risk Assessment , And
Control

Technological advancement is directly proportional to time. How would technology

be a great significance in mitigating hazard identification, risk assessment, and control in
order to maintain occupational safety? Would the workers be more productive and
confident in workplace, or the workers became much dependent on the advancements
making them difficult to adapt in minding occupational safety?
According to the ILO estimates (2015), every year over 2.3 million women and men
die at work from an occupational injury or disease. Globalization has resulted in
technological, social, and organizational changes in workplaces over the last 20 years,
which have been accompanied by new risks: New and more complex technologies, such
as nanotechnologies; organizational restructuring; emerging employment forms, such as
temporary, part-time, and home-based work, outsourcing, and self-employment; and the
ageing of the workforce, lack of access to employment of young workers and an
increasing number of workers in the informal economy. With these, trends in a changing
world and workforce are expected to continue and be worsened by global recessions.
Currently, safety professionals will have more access to safety technologies than ever
before as the technology rises. This does not mean occupational safety improved
overtime. Organizations had difficulty adapting with the integration of new systems. This
may lead to confusions in workforce and may lead to more risky behaviors of the workers.
Organizational reconstructing due to new technological integration may lead to
deprivation of will, making sub-contractual and part-time job offers to rise and leads to
complicated occupational safety monitoring to individual workers. The ageing workforce
still not open for changes as they were more comfortable with the traditional methods. In
fact, 71.4 percent of construction contractors and subcontractors surveyed used
outmoded data collection technologies such as paper or spreadsheets in the field.
However, 50 to 60 percent of those businesses used accounting, project management,
and estimating software for years (JBKnowledge,2016). Henceforth, the workers would
be more exposed to poor working conditions and hazardous chemicals; the worker’s
safety and health trainings will be compromised; and the worker’s participation in the
workplace have lesser chances.
On the other perspective, it also argues that with the rapid pace of change in
employment patterns and rising technology in recent years, it has become increasingly
vital to foresee various, and occasionally emerging work-risks if they are to be properly
managed. In recent years, foresight methods have become more popular. Identifying
today's research and innovation goals based on future science, technology, social, and
economic circumstances. Forecasting, technology evaluation, future studies, and other
foresight procedures attempt to identify long-term trends and thereby guide decision-
making. With the application of foresight methodology to OSH, prospective hazards and
dangers can be identified ahead of time, allowing for effective preventive measures to be
performed. This strategy had more accuracy in predicting new dangers. In addition,
several long-standing OSH concerns are being revisited considering changing work
patterns and technologies. The reason for reconsidering is that risks that emerged were
increasingly linked to new technologies that have been created and applied without
adequate consideration of OSH issues, new types of workplaces, or social and
organizational changes. For this to become more effective, OSH councils should invest
more time in monitoring organizations which uses technology without the basis of proper
studies to conduct accurate risk assessments, hazard identification and provide controls.
The practice of analyzing workplace threats to workers' safety and health is known
as occupational risk assessment ( Khon & Friend, 2010). This is a thorough analysis of
the elements of work that considers: what could cause injury or harm, whether the
hazards can be removed and, if not, what preventative or protective measures are in
place, or should be, to control the risks. Regarding to different workplaces, it is always a
need to have a proper risk assessment and management not just to cater the needs of
the different employees such as safety and health but also to foster trust within the
workplace. Luckily, data gathering, storing and analyzing is much more convenient in this
era.
“In the future, it’s going to be this giant flash flood of data coming from
everything we use, including people’s movements and all the machines’
movements, and everything else. It’s already beyond human
comprehension, and it’s going to jump by orders of magnitude…….Right
now, things are very general and industrywide, and as we get more data
and better tools to handle that data, we move to more process specific. In
the future, we’ll get more specific, down to employees and even machines.
Each employee might have his own customized health and safety plan.
Each department on a factory floor might have its own customized plan,
based on lots of real data.”
Keith Bowers (2018)
Keith bowers, founder of Bowers Management Analytics, makes sense integrating
technology in risk assessment, hazard identification and easily distinguished controls. As
risk assessments need continuous data over the years, technology helped in assimilating
the need of data in order to have studies and have active recommendations and new
theory-based safety systems. Organizations can easily layout their vision, mission, and
plans for the benefit of the group and the workforce safety and health aspects.
Health and safety executive listed some steps in performing risk assessments.
First, identify the hazards in the workplace whether it is from the environment,
organization, equipment, human or product and how people might be harmed by these
hazards. Furthermore, evaluating, and recording the findings will be done to perform
immediate actions and long term solutions. Moreover, evaluating of risks will be done by
using risk matrix which has the formula of probability of the event and severity of harm.
And lastly, provide hazard controls. Hazard controls were given from the first line of
defense which is the elimination, second is substitution, next is engineering controls, then
administrative controls and to the last line of defense which is the Personal Protective
Equipment.
Unfortunately, these techniques or legal improvements discovered were
insufficient to reduce workplace risks (Gupta et al., 2021). In order to improve efficiency,
technological integration should be implemented especially in personal protective
equipments (PPE), ergonomics, record keeping and communication systems.

“Through use of this technology, workers are becoming inherently more

aware of the risks they encounter every day and are adapting their
behaviors to protect themselves from potentially dangerous situations.”
Michael Eldridge (2017)

Michael Eldridge, founder of SafetyGlassesUSA.com, provide the idea that

workers attitude and awareness of safety became more rigid with the usage of
technology. The idea of providing workers with wearable technology to allow for real-time
monitoring and the elimination of potential workplace dangers is critical. This can be done
with the use of sensors. Worker’s priority regarding with their health and safety with the
use of sensors in physiological monitoring, monitoring of physical parameters,
biochemical parameters, environmental sensing are being developed and some are now
used real-time. Wearables that can detect blood alcohol and stress or alertness metrics
will likely become more common in the future, allowing managers to identify workers who
are at danger. This makes sense because personal protective equipment is rapidly
evolving with monitoring devices that capture and record real-time biometric, location, and
movement data and protective glasses now have a lot of room to connect with AI and
other technologies to improve how workers see and analyze their surroundings.
Due to an increase in the frequency of workplace accidents in recent decades, the
discipline of occupational health and safety has become a hot topic. Every employee
expects a safe working environment. Any company must identify hazards, assess the risk
they pose, and develop facilities to mitigate those risks. Adaptation of technology is hardly
to accept by non-tech savvy people and prefer traditional methods. The lack of study also
pulls back organization in advanced safety processing. Nevertheless, integrating to PPE
is now seen in some industries. Applying technology only in wearables is easy to adapt
an effective method to improve safety efficiency. It is critical to implement the concept of
wearable technology in order to better identify and minimize occupational dangers.
Technology has the power to fix all of society's problems. The same may be said of
occupational health and safety. Technology is inevitable, it should be part of the system.
Implementing it should be gradual and based on real-time studies in order to convince
people to adapt and learn new-processes and replace traditional. Gradually
implementing, risk assessment, hazard identification and control in the aspect of
occupational safety will be improved overtime and will be accepted by the people.
References.
Eldridge M. (2017). How Is Technology Impacting Workplace Safety?. Retrieved from
https://blog.safetyglassesusa.com/technology-impacting-workplace-safety/
Ferguson A. (2018). Technology, ‘big data’ and worker safety. Retrieved from
https://www.safetyandhealthmagazine.com/articles/17820-technology-big-
data-and-worker-safety
Friend MA, Kohn JP, (2010). Fundamentals Occupational Safety and Health,British
Library, p. 127-159
Gupta et. Al (June 2021). Technological advancements in occupational health and safety,
Measurement: Sensors. ISSN 2665-9174 [Vol.15, 100045, June
2021].https://doi.org/10.1016/j.measen.2021.100045.
International Labor Organization (2015). GLOBAL TRENDS ON OCCUPATIONAL
ACCIDENTS AND DISEASES. Retrieved from
https://www.ilo.org/legacy/english/osh/en/story_content/external_files/fs_st_1-
ILO_5_en.pdf
JBKnowledge (2015). The 5th Annual Construction Report. Retrieved from
https://jbknowledge.com/wp-
content/uploads/2017/09/2016_JBKnowledge_Construction_Technology_Rep
ort.pdf