Yang Miang GohNational University of Singapore | NUS · Department of Building
Yang Miang Goh
PhD (NUS)
About
125
Publications
81,460
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Introduction
Associate Professor Goh is the Dean's Chair at the School of Design and Environment (SDE), National University of Singapore (NUS). He is also the Director of the Centre for Project and Facilities Management (formerly known as Project Management and Construction Law), Department of Building, NUS. He concurrently leads the Safety and Resilience Research Unit (SaRRU) in the Centre. Dr Goh specialises in Workplace Safety and Health (WSH) and risk management.
Additional affiliations
January 2017 - present
April 2012 - December 2016
January 2011 - April 2012
Publications
Publications (125)
Workplace safety has received increasing attention as millions of workers worldwide suffer from work-related accidents. Despite poor housekeeping is a significant contributor to construction accidents, there remains a significant lack of technological research focused on improving housekeeping practices in construction sites. Recognizing and locati...
There is growing interest in using safety analytics and machine learning to support the prevention of workplace incidents, especially in high-risk industries like construction and trucking. Although existing safety analytics studies have made remarkable progress, they suffer from imbalanced datasets, a common problem in safety analytics, resulting...
To enhance the investigation, analysis, and design of safe human-robot interactions (HRI), this study develops a comprehensive taxonomy of safety-related errors in HRI and examines the relationships between errors and the types and levels of HRI. Analyzing 262 HRI accident case reports, the research identifies and categorizes human and robot errors...
The construction industry remains one of the most hazardous industries. This study investigates the interplay between bottom-up (stimulus-driven) and top-down (goal-directed) attentional mechanisms in hazard perception within immersive virtual reality (VR) environments. Twenty students participated in the experiment, performing forklift operating a...
Understanding the antecedents of construction workers' unsafe behavior is significant for developing effective interventions. Many studies have suggested that hazard perception failure influences workers' unsafe behavior. However, the relationship between hazard perception failure and workers' unsafe behavior remains anecdotal and has yet to be emp...
There is a rising interest in using artificial intelligence (AI)-powered safety analytics to predict accidents in the trucking industry. Companies may face the practical challenge, however, of not having enough data to develop good safety analytics models. Although pretrained models may offer a solution for such companies, existing safety research...
Traditional teaching methods like lectures can hinder the integration of theoretical knowledge and practical skills in higher education. To address this challenge, digital simulation games (DSGs) offer promising solutions through immersive and interactive learning experiences. Research shows that DSGs can motivate learners, enhance subject interest...
The transportation industry, particularly the trucking sector, is prone to workplace accidents and fatalities. Accidents involving large trucks accounted for a considerable percentage of overall traffic fatalities. Recognizing the crucial role of safety climate in accident prevention, researchers have sought to understand its factors and measure it...
The dynamics of construction processes pose significant challenges for workers to perceive, understand, and anticipate hazards on sites. Maintaining an adequate level of situation awareness (SA) is critical for safety. Recent years have seen increasing research interests in SA and digital technology (DT) in the construction safety field. However, t...
Virtual Reality (VR) provides an immersive and engaging experience that facilitates the teaching and learning of abstract concepts. This paper describes the design and implementation of the VR 360° (VR360) component of the Virtual and Augmented Reality for Structures (VARS) mobile application. This study used VARS to teach basic structural systems...
Many studies indicated that the COVID-19 pandemic had significant impacts on construction safety. However, the studies had differing views on whether the pandemic increased or decreased construction safety performance. Furthermore, past studies did not adopt a comparative time series approach to evaluate the impact of the pandemic on construction s...
Understanding the traffic patterns of construction workers on high-risk construction sites is important for implementing behaviour-based safety management. However, safety risks in worker trajectories are a complex system with high uncertainty. This resulted in few studies focusing on analysing the spatial–temporal risk in workers' trajectories fro...
The pandemic has caused a drastic shift to online teaching and learning. However, online teaching and learning still face similar problems to traditional teaching and learning, and one example is the “one-size-fits-all” approach. The ineffectiveness of such an approach is particularly pronounced in interdisciplinary teaching and learning. For examp...
The Singapore government enacted the Workplace Safety and Health (Design for Safety) Regulations in 2015. However, the construction industry continues to be the nation’s main contributor to workplace injuries. As such, there is a need to develop competency in Design for Safety (DfS) within the industry so that designers (i.e., engineers and archite...
Construction workers’ unsafe behavior is one of the most frequent and direct causes of site accidents, thus a good understanding of its associated mechanisms is essential for the development of targeted interventions. Among all, the cognitive mechanism of construction workers’ unsafe behavior (CM-CWUB) is key to understanding reasons underlying uns...
The issue of construction workers’ unsafe behavior has been a global challenge. Behavior is a product of human cognition, and research from a cognitive perspective can potentially curb unsafe behavior at its source. Hence, safety cognition research is proliferating quickly. Many studies have explored the antecedents of safety cognition, but most fo...
Crane activities pose significant safety risks on construction sites. Thus, numerous studies have applied computer vision techniques to identify crane load fall zones or areas where the crane load could fall during an accident. However, past studies typically assumed that the fall zone directly below the load was static and had a fixed size. In rea...
As the most frequent type of hazardous events at metro construction sites, collapse accidents are very dangerous and can bring about multiple injuries and fatalities. This study aims to conduct an accident data-driven investigation on collapses for the reduction of metro construction safety risks. A total of 178 collapse accident cases were collect...
Introduction:
Many countries introduced mandatory Design for Safety (DfS) or Prevention through Design (PtD) requirements to reduce construction accident rates. However, there is a knowledge gap on the relative importance of industry level interventions to improve the implementation of DfS regulations. Thus, this study aims to identify and priorit...
The impacts of climate change on workplace safety and health (WSH) have not been thoroughly explored. Furthermore, the existing literature has not focused specifically on the Facility Management (FM) industry despite being prone to WSH accidents and climate change impacts. This study reviews the current knowledge on WSH hazards in the FM industry a...
Effective safety management education is essential for improving safety within the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry. While new information technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR) and Mixed Reality (MR) are increasingly explored to improve safety management education and training, they are currently limited by the lack of...
In 2001, Prensky proposed the digital game-based learning (DGBL) theory by merging digital games and educational design. Many DGBL studies have been conducted in formal education settings but rarely was the effectiveness of DGBL on adult learners in the context of professional upskilling examined. To examine the influence of DGBL on professional up...
Background
Previous research has shown that the inability to identify hazards is the leading cause of workplace accidents and fatalities. The lack of competency in hazard identification implies a crucial need to improve the teaching and learning approaches in construction safety training and education.
Purpose/Hypothesis
This study developed the e...
Construction safety has drawn increasing attention from both researchers and practitioners. The relationships between safety-specific leadership behaviors and safety behaviors are well-documented. However, less is known about whether and how other leadership behaviors such as temporal leadership, which focuses on managing time-related resources for...
The purpose of the current study was to use a mixed-methods approach to understanding safety climate and the strategies to improve safety climate among truck drivers. Using both survey (N = 7246) and interview (N = 18) responses provided by truck drivers regarding key safety climate items, the current study identified a number of positive and negat...
The outbreak of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) poses a great threat to the world. One mandatory and efficient measure to prevent the spread of COVID-19 on construction sites is to ensure safe distancing during workers’ daily activities. However, manual monitoring of safe distancing during construction activities can be toilsome and inconsisten...
The installation of barricades effectively prevents falls from height (FFH) on construction sites. Common approaches for detecting missing barricades (e.g., manual inspection of the site or three-dimensional models) are not practical due to two inherent challenges: (1) these approaches are labor-intensive and time-consuming; and (2) FFH hazards are...
This study evaluates the effectiveness of Augmented Reality (AR) in improving undergraduate non-engineering students’ (n = 103) achievement of learning outcomes and their perception of AR as a learning tool. An AR application for teaching structural systems, Virtual and Augmented Reality for Structures (VARS), is developed and tested using a quasi-...
This research stresses the importance of engaging with local conventions in managing health and safety of working in hot weather on construction site. In Singapore, the tropical climate pattern made wearables a cost-efficient safety measure to prevent heat injuries on site. A concurrent study was designed to understand the ecology of managing heat...
In recent years, numerous studies on construction safety climate (CSC) had emerged, but there are concerns about the inconsistencies in the definitions, measurement, and factor structures of CSC. The inconsistencies in these empirical studies cause difficulties in growing a coherent body of knowledge to facilitate its sustained development and impl...
Previous research regarding safety in design (SiD) primarily focused on legal aspects of integrating health and safety into the design, identifying causal links between flawed designs and accidents, safe design tools and methods, and multi-stakeholder collaboration. Despite these advancements in SiD, there is a lack of studies investigating how new...
Recent years have seen growing interests in developing and applying computer vision technologies to solve safety problems in the construction industry. Despite the technological advancements, there is no research that exams the theoretical links between computer vision technology and safety science and management. Thus, the objectives of this paper...
The sustainable development of old industrial buildings is in line with the national construction strategy and has an important impact on current urban renewal. Only by achieving a unified balance among economic, social, and environmental factors can reused industrial buildings be considered sustainable. However, there are no relevant sustainabilit...
Acclimatization is a process in which human body adapts to a hot environment by developing capacities of more efficient heat dissipation and electrolyte retention. International heat stress management standards specify thresholds of up to 5 o C-WBGT difference for acclimatised and non-acclimatised populations, and a 3-14 days' period for newcomers...
Purpose: Prevention through design has been identified as a possible measure to prevent construction-related accidents. To operationalize this, Design for Safety (DfS) was introduced in Singapore as a legislatively mandated set of design review meeting with safety being the main focus. This study aims to investigate how DfS is practised in the earl...
The energy balance approach is one of the design approaches approved in fall protection standards Z359.6, Z259.16 and SS607 to ensure that horizontal lifeline systems (HLLSs) are adequately designed. However, this study found that theoretical calculations predicting total fall distance and maximum arrest load using an energy balance approach need t...
The construction industry produces a large amount of data on a daily basis. However, existing data sets have not been fully exploited in analyzing the safety factors of construction projects. Thus, this work describes how temporal analysis techniques can be applied to improve the safety management of construction data. Various time series (TS) meth...
To ensure that vertical lifeline systems (VLLS) are well-designed, calculation methods are required to estimate the extension of personal energy absorber (PEA) (xPEA) and total fall distance (hTFD). Thus, the authors conducted 28 tests to validate the accuracy of the energy-balance approach for estimating xPEA and hTFD of VLLS and propose suitable...
Fall from roof (FFR) has been a perennial problem in the construction industry. It has been one of the leading sources of injuries and accidents in many countries. The objectives of this paper are to (1) investigate the causes of fall from roof; (2) identify control measures to roof safety that are being used in the Singapore construction industry;...
One way to encourage adoption of prefabrication and off-site manufacturing (OSM) techniques, such as modular construction, is to improve the efficiency of site operations, which makes the technology more attractive to non-adopters. Lean principles have been widely applied to improve the productivity and efficiency of construction operations, while...
To capture a big picture of construction safety, system dynamics modelling has been increasingly applied. Despite the popularity, there have been confusion and inconsistencies in variables and their interrelationships at the conceptual level. This paper aims to propose a generic system dynamics model which can be used as a theoretical framework to...
https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/11094
Safety is a major concern in the construction industry. Recent studies have shown that many construction fatalities are related to design and could have been avoided with proper design considerations. Nevertheless, designers have limited knowledge about construction safety and often are unable to identify how their designs may pose a risk during th...
Fall from heights (FFH) has been a major contributor towards both minor and major workrelated injuries in the construction industry. In order to facilitate knowledge reuse/sharing and the development of knowledge-based systems for working at height, this paper aims to develop a lightweight ontology of control measures for fall from height (FFH) in...
Behavior-based safety (BBS) has received significant attention in the construction industry during the past decades. Ample evidence suggests that BBS is an effective accident prevention strategy. Past BBS literature is dominated by successful case studies, while unsuccessful cases and cases with mixed effectiveness in reducing unsafe behavior are l...
The construction industry is one of the most dangerous industries in many countries. To improve the situation, senior managers overseeing portfolios of construction projects need to understand the safety risk levels of their projects so that interventions can be implemented proactively. Safety leading indicators is one way to flag sites that are of...
Fall from height is a perennial problem in the construction industry. Active fall protection system (AFPS) is frequently a must in situations where working conditions are difficult and other controls are not feasible or inadequate. However, the design and selection of AFPS are still problematic in the construction industry. This paper aims to devel...
This paper aims to develop an ontology (AFPS-Onto) which formalizes the knowledge of active fall protection system (AFPS) design, with attempt to facilitate knowledge sharing and reuse. METHONTOLOGY was adopted as a method to build the AFPS-Onto. The AFPS-Onto consists of nine core concepts: hazard, actor, task, ifc building element, construction m...
There is an increased interest in using text mining techniques to automatically classify text-based accident descriptions in industries such as aviation, medical and construction. The ability to automatically classify accident narratives enables large text databases to be analyzed to provide insights on accidents and near misses. Several machine le...
This paper aims to investigate the design for safety (DfS) knowledge, attitude, and practice (KAP) of multiple stakeholders, including architects, civil and structural (CS) engineers, mechanical and electrical (ME) engineers, developers/clients, project managers, and safety professionals, and propose potential interventions to improve the DfS imple...
This paper aims to develop a set of safety leading indicators that can be used by construction companies to assess safety levels and measure safety performance at the project level. The development process follows a four-step method: conceptualization, operationalization, indicator generation, and validation and revision. A pressure-state-practice...
One of the most vulnerable groups, in terms of workplace safety and health, are migrant workers who work temporarily in different countries and may not have the same level of protection as permanent residents. Their vulnerability can result in injured migrant workers being stranded in a foreign country without proper post-accident care and compensa...
Being information-intensive, the construction industry has the feature of multiagents, including multiparticipants from different disciplines, multiprocesses with a long-span timeline, and multidocuments generated by various systems. The multistakeholder context of the construction industry creates problems such as poor information interoperability...
Fall from height (FFH) is a major problem in the construction industry in many countries including Australia, Singapore, Taiwan, and the U.S. In response to the perennial problem of FFH fatalities, the Singapore Manpower Ministry enacted the Work at Heights (WAH) Regulations in 2013. The WAH Regulations requires construction worksites to develop an...
Despite efforts in recent years, the construction industry remains one of the top contributors for workplace fatalities in many countries. One of the key concerns in the industry is the management of workers' safety behavior. This paper aims to explore the cognitive factors influencing the unsafe behavior of not anchoring a safety harness when work...
Horizontal lifeline system (HLLS) is one of the most widely used fall arrest systems for mitigating the risk of work-at-height in the construction and building industry. A HLLS must ensure the maximum arrest load created during a fall arrest does not exceed the capacity of the anchors and other system components. In addition, the maximum arrest for...
Unlabelled:
Accurate comprehension and analysis of complex sociotechnical systems is a daunting task. Empirically examining, or simply envisioning the structure and behaviour of such systems challenges traditional analytic and experimental approaches as well as our everyday cognitive capabilities. Computer-based models and simulations afford poten...
The Singapore process industry is mainly made up of chemical and energy companies such as Mitsui Chemicals, Clariant, Exxon Mobil, Shell, Sumitomo, Petrochemical Corporation of Singapore and Infineum. Majority of these companies are located on Jurong Island, southwest of Singapore. Jurong Island houses nearly 100 leading petroleum, petrochemicals a...
The personal energy absorber (PEA) is a critical component of a personal fall arrest system (PFAS), and it is meant to dissipate the energy generated during a fall to prevent injuries to the user. When designing PFASs, engineers need to estimate the fall distance of the user, and one of the parameters needed is the average deployment force (Fa) of...
A neural network analysis was conducted on a quantitative occupational safety and health management system (OSHMS) audit with accident data obtained from the Singapore construction industry. The analysis is meant to investigate, through a case study, how neural network methodology can be used to understand the relationship between OSHMS elements an...
Two criteria for determining the capacity of personal fall arrest energy absorbers are maximum extension and maximum arrest force. There are concerns that despite the increasing weight of workers, most energy absorbers of personal fall arrest systems are only tested to 100 kg. In a previous study, a series of dynamic drop tests based on the Austral...
Accident prevention, over the last twenty years in construction and engineering, has improved (i.e. less deaths and accidents during construction). Construction and engineering researchers have tended to assume a linear approach to accident analysis, which has hindered the development of appropriate prevention techniques. To understand the mechanis...
Design errors contribute significantly to cost and schedule growth in social infrastructure projects and to engineering failures, which can result in accidents and loss of life. Despite considerable research that has addressed their error causation in construction projects they still remain prevalent. This paper identifies the underlying conditions...