Mahmoud Habibnezhad

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Assistant Professor at Louisiana State University

The unstructured nature of the labor-intensive construction industry negatively affects the health of workers. These challenges require a robust health monitoring approach to accurately monitor workers’ overall health status. Recent advancements in wearable technologies and physiological sensing have provided ample opportunities towards an objectiv...

Unsafe workplace environment, labor shortage, and low productivity rate are among the most critical challenges faced by the construction industry. These ongoing challenges have prompted the construction research community to explore robotization as a new direction of improvement. Most of these endeavors have focused on human-robot collaboration (HR...

Automation and Robotics in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction Industry provides distinct and unified insight into current and future construction robotics, offering readers a comprehensive perspective for constructing a road map and illuminating improvements for a successful transition towards construction robotization. The book covers...

Construction workers are at a high risk of exposure to excessive heat generated by several factors such as intensive physical activities, personal protective clothing, and frequent heat events at construction sites. Previous studies attempted to evaluate the occupational risk of heat stress by concentrating on environmental variables or the self-as...

Construction workers' poor mental states can lead to numerous safety and productivity issues. One major trend in construction research is quantitatively evaluating workers' psychophysiological states. With the advances in wearable electroencephalogram (EEG) devices, such assessment can be possible by interpreting workers' brainwave patterns. Howeve...

Recently, the use of collaborative robots has started to emerge at construction sites. Such incorporation into these human-dominated environments can raise safety concerns as most robots are not fully automated and require some sort of control mechanism. Conventional control systems may fall short under specific situations in which workers require...

Falling from elevated surfaces is the leading cause of death and injury at construction sites. Dynamic instability is mostly the reason for these falls. By using virtual reality (VR) simulations, previous studies have shown that biomechanical measurements of gait are reliable indicators of fall risk. Despite success in understanding critical factor...

Due to the unstructured, fast-changing environment of construction sites, robots require human assistance to perform various tasks, especially those involving high dexterity and nuanced human judgment. However, in shared physical spaces, human-robot collaboration (HRC) can raise new safety concerns as workers' mental health can be adversely affecte...

Within an intelligent automated cyber-physical system, the realization of the autonomous mechanism for data collection, data integration, and data analysis plays a critical role in the design, development, operation, and maintenance of such a system. This construct is particularly vital for fault-tolerant route-finding systems that rely on the impr...

Due to hazardous working environments at complex, unstructured, and dynamic construction sites, workers frequently face potential safety and health risks throughout the construction process. In this regard, addressing safety challenges remains one of the top priorities. Construction workers' ability to identify and assess risks is acquired through...

Falling from heights is the primary cause of death and injuries at construction sites. As loss of balance has a fundamental effect on falling, it is important to understand postural regulation behavior during construction tasks at heights, especially those that require precise focus in an upright standing position (therefore, a dual-task demand on...

Elastic and muscular arteries differ in structure, function, and mechanical properties, and may adapt differently to aging. We compared the descending thoracic aortas (TA) and the superficial femoral arteries (SFA) of 27 tissue donors (average 41±18 years, range 13-73 years) using planar biaxial testing, constitutive modeling, and bidirectional his...

The emergence of new technologies in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industries allow decision-makers to gain a great deal of control over every stage of their projects. However, due to the dynamic and fragmented nature of the AEC industry, developing an effective data exchange between AEC professionals and the constructio...

Recently, interdependency between electricity, gas, and water infrastructures are increasing due to convincing reasons and critical dependence of societies to such infrastructures. In this paper, the interconnection of the natural gas, water and power generation systems is firstly described. Then, mathematical problem formulation of economic enviro...

Alaska is at the forefront of climate change and subject to salient challenges including energy consumption. It is important to understand Alaskans' perceptions and opinions about energy consumption to solve Alaska's domestic energy problems and creating a sustainable future. However, it is challenging to collect public opinions about energy consum...

Multi-chiller systems with thermal storage units are widely used to supply the cooling load of residential and commercial buildings. Due to the significant energy consumption, economic dispatch has been a crucial issue in multi-chiller systems. This paper presents a robust optimization approach for the day-ahead scheduling of a multi-chiller system...

The construction industry is among the most hazardous industries in the United States, associated with a high number of accidents. Workers’ fatigue has been recognized as one of the four major causes of fatal incidents in this industry. Therefore, early identification of workers’ fatigue in a project could support accident prevention. To this end,...

Workers’ poor mental status (e.g., stress and mental fatigue) is a critical factor in accidents, errors, and loss of productivity at construction sites. With recent advances in wearable technologies, workers’ mental status can be monitored by examining patterns of brainwaves in their electroencephalogram (EEG) signal. Acquiring high-quality EEG in...

The construction industry is among the most stressful of occupations. Traditional techniques to evaluate worker stress (e.g., self-assessment and observational checklists) may not be effective in the field because of their potential to interrupt workers’ ongoing tasks. Additionally, these methods are subject to biases. Research in neuroscience conf...

Aortic mechanical and structural characteristics have profound effects on pathophysiology, but many aspects of physiologic stress-stretch state and intramural changes due to aging remain poorly understood in human tissues. While difficult to assess in vivo due to residual stresses and pre-stretch, physiologic stress-stretch characteristics can be c...

It is difficult to conduct training and evaluate workers' postural performance by using the actual job site environment due to safety concerns. Virtual reality (VR) provides an alternative to create immersive working environments without significant safety concerns. Working on elevated surfaces is a dangerous scenario, which may lead to gait and po...

Falling from elevated surfaces is the main cause of death and injury at construction sites. Based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports, an average of nearly three workers per day suffer fatal injuries from falling. Studies show that postural instability is the foremost cause of this disproportional falling rate. To study what affects the...

Falling from elevated surfaces is the main cause of death and injury at construction sites. Based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports, an average of nearly three workers per day suffer fatal injuries from falling. Studies show that postural instability is the foremost cause of this disproportional falling rate. To study what affects the...

It is difficult to conduct training and evaluate workers’ postural performance by using the actual job site environment due to safety concerns. Virtual reality (VR) provides an alternative to create immersive working environments without significant safety concerns. Working on elevated surfaces is a dangerous scenario, which may lead to gait and po...

Automated image processing methods are greatly needed to replace the tedious, manual histology analysis still performed by many physicians. This thesis focuses on pathological studies that express the essential role of elastin lamella in the resilience and elastic properties of the arterial blood vessels. Due to the stochastic nature of the shape a...

On average, in every two work hours, one person dies from work-related injuries at construction sites. Most incidents are due to falling from elevated surfaces. Slips, trips, and loss of balance are the main causes. Studies suggest that instigating visual mismatch and physiological changes are among the most important reasons behind falling from na...

Falling from elevated surfaces is the main cause of death and injury at construction sites. Based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports, an average of nearly three workers per day suffer fatal injuries from falling. Studies show that postural instability is the foremost cause of this disproportional falling rate. To study what affects the...

Accidents occur at an unacceptable rate in the construction industry. Failure to notice hazards or misperceptions about their associated risks are among the most important human factors that lead to accidents. This study tests the hypothesis that workers’ risk perception impacts their visual search strategies when identifying hazards. We tested thi...

The construction industry is known for its high rate of occupational death and injuries worldwide. Despite implementation of several injury-prevention practices, workers still suffer from a high rate of injuries. A large portion of these injuries can be attributed to workers' misperception of a hazard. Due to this issue's importance, several studie...

Over the past few years, steel plate shear walls (SPSWs) have become a matter of interest to civil engineers due to their high strength and energy absorption capacity during earthquakes. This study used the finite element method (FEM) to investigate the amount of absorbed energy by the SPSWs, incorporating three types of steel plates with yield str...