Construction Health and Safety Training: The Utilisation of 4D Enabled Serious Games

Health and safety (H&S) is a major concern in the construction industry. Recent and historical data from the construction industry worldwide demonstrate that the human, social, and economic burden , inflicted as a result of H&S - related fatalities, is still significant. Training is a key strategy to reduce H&S risks. T he investigation of serious games for H &S training in construction as complementary to traditional training methods has attracted significant interest in recent years . Current studies in this area have mainly focussed on scenario - led training where trainees interact wit h the same environment through pre - defined options in discrete game sections. This approach has limitations in terms of variety and amount of skills that trainees can lea rn . In this paper, the proposed approach is to enable a sandbox style serious game through the encapsulation of 4D (3D + time) concept in the game design with the hypothesis that this approach would influence the capability of trainee to spot safety hazard s and the way they interact with the game . Such a serious game was deve loped for a real - world project which was modelled at three different as a replica of the planned schedule. The testing of the environment with 12 students demonstrated that combining se rious game s and 4D approaches can improve users’ engagement and affect their abilities to spot H&S hazards.