How Wearable Tech Can Improve Your Contracting Business

Construction workers rely on all of their senses to do their jobs in a safe and effective manner. Sometimes, this just isn’t enough. Wearable technology is one way that construction businesses are expanding to make their efforts more accurate and less likely to result in disaster. Here are a few tools that you might consider incorporating into your business practices.

What Is Wearable Technology?

Wearable technology is fairly simple to understand and use, even if the tools themselves can be quite complicated in design. These devices attach to your body or something you wear, like a hard hat or even a pair of shoes. Depending on the wearable, it can gather information about you or your surroundings. Then, the device can deliver that information to you or someone else who has access to that data. The premise behind wearables is that construction businesses can dramatically improve safety, reduce the risk of injury and even improve output on the jobsite.

Health Monitors

Many construction jobs call for a high amount of physical labor. The demanding nature of the industry requires people to be in fairly good condition while they’re working. In some cases, the work environment presents certain hazards that can put workers at risk. Wearables, not unlike the Fitbit or Apple Watch you got for your birthday, can monitor aspects of your health like your heart rate and movement. On a day that’s 110 degrees when your team is working outside for hours, this could alert you to a dangerous situation. With the alerts, you can tell when one of your employees desperately needs a break.

Safety Alerts

Many injuries happen on the jobsite when people aren’t paying attention, or when they’re not following proper safety protocols. In other cases, it is simply too difficult to tell where the danger is. A worker who is intensely focused on their own tasks may not notice that they are too close to falling, or that heavy machinery is operating nearby. Wearables can identify the location of these possible hazards and alert you to their presence. Some systems create a basic language out of vibrations so that the wearer can figure out which kind of hazard they are facing in an instant.

Emergency Communications

On a jobsite of reasonable size, you may have a general sense of where your workers are located but not their precise condition at any moment. In the event that someone becomes sick or injured, the ability to communicate immediately is paramount. Rather than simply gathering data, some wearables give users the ability to push a button to communicate an emergency. This can draw attention to the problem more quickly and possibly keep minor injuries from becoming major ones.

Tech to Improve Output

Although the major focus of wearables is on improving general health and safety on the construction site, some innovators are working on output, as well. Visual wearables stream images from various places on the site to people on the ground. This can make it easier for you to see what one of your workers is looking at without having to be right next to them. It simplifies the process of troubleshooting and may save you the cost of hiring a drone, if you’ve already got workers in the right spot.

Other wearables can even make workers more effective. Repetitive stress in certain jobs can be difficult to sustain, much less avoid injury with frequent use. Construction exoskeletons keep workers in a more comfortable position and can increase their strength and durability. This allows them to do certain tasks for longer periods of time, or accomplish them faster without putting themselves at risk.

Wearables are just one type of technology that is exploding with innovation for the construction industry. If you get a chance to try them out, you can see why everyone is talking about them. To start learning about the kinds of technology you’ll need to run a contracting business, visit CSLS today!