ErgoChat: a Visual Query System for the Ergonomic Risk Assessment of Construction Workers

In the construction sector, workers often endure prolonged periods of high-intensity physical work and prolonged use of tools, resulting in injuries and illnesses primarily linked to postural ergonomic risks, a longstanding predominant health concern. To mitigate these risks, researchers have applied various technological methods to identify the ergonomic risks that construction workers face. However, traditional ergonomic risk assessment (ERA) techniques do not offer interactive feedback. The rapidly developing vision-language models (VLMs), capable of generating textual descriptions or answering questions about ergonomic risks based on image inputs, have not yet received widespread attention. This research introduces an interactive visual query system tailored to assess the postural ergonomic risks of construction workers. The system's capabilities include visual question answering (VQA), which responds to visual queries regarding workers' exposure to postural ergonomic risks, and image captioning (IC), which generates textual descriptions of these risks from images. Additionally, this study proposes a dataset designed for training and testing such methodologies. Systematic testing indicates that the VQA functionality delivers an accuracy of 96.5%. Moreover, evaluations using nine metrics for IC and assessments from human experts indicate that the proposed approach surpasses the performance of a method using the same architecture trained solely on generic datasets. This study sets a new direction for future developments in interactive ERA using generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Keywords: Generative Artificial Intelligence; Vision-Language Model; Large language model; Ergonomic Risk Assessment; Construction Safety 1 Introduction Prompt and effective identification and mitigation of workplace hazards are essential for maintaining safety, health, and productivity within the work environment. In the construction industry, workers are often subject to conditions that require awkward body postures, repetitive motions, and intense physical effort, which can detrimentally impact their health [1]. Such conditions in construction tasks usually lead to the emergence of work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WMSDs). Statistics from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the construction industry's injuries and illnesses caused by WMSDs ranked fifth among all industries. Moreover, in the same year, WMSDs represented 30% of all occupational injuries and illnesses [1]. According to the Association of Workers' Compensation Boards of Canada, the manufacturing and construction sectors reported the second and third-highest rates of losttime injury claims in 2021, representing 13.6% and 10.4% of claims, respectively [2]. European Agency for Safety and Health at Work indicated that the construction and manufacturing sectors reported the highest sick leave rates due to WMSDs [3].