Citation

Ji Z, Wang Y, Zhang Y, Gao Y, Cao Y, Yang SH. Safety Sci. 2023; 158: e105999.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2023, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.ssci.2022.105999

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Safety training using Virtual Reality (VR) can be widely found in many industries. They are majorly focused on educating sequential operations, standard working procedures, and short-term safety risk assessment. Occupational health and safety (OHS) issues at the workplace contain both short-term safety incidents and long-term health issues. Comparing to short-term safety training, long-term health training is little discussed in the existing literature. One of the reasons is that the health issues are more complex than safety, as the biological outcomes may take time to develop, affected by multiple resources, and the injuries may be cumulative. The key contribution of the current paper is the development of a solid training method based on the integration of diminished quality of life (DQL) risk assessment and VR, namely DQL-VR. The use of DQL-VR would assist in delivering OHS knowledge to trainees with a special focus on chronic health components. The use of DQL increases the ability of trainees to determine long-term health hazards and perceive long-term health risks. The use of VR improves the learning efficacy and users' acceptance of the safety training. A pilot test is investigated to examine the efficacy of DQL-VR comparing with traditional safety training. The result shows that DQL-VR has great positive efforts in teaching hazard identification and risk perception, especially for long-term health aspects. The findings also indicate that the use of DQL-VR would benefit trainees' recall of knowledge. The development of DQL-VR also offers opportunities for trainees to foresee the hazards and experience the harmful consequences in a safe environment.

Language: en

Keywords

Diminished quality of life; Hazard identification; Occupational health and safety; Risk perception; Safety training; Virtual reality