The impact of new technologies on occupational safety and health from the point of view of their academic interest

The impact of new technologies on occupational safety and health from the point of view of their academic interest Nieves Cuadrado Cabello1[0009-0003-3771-1607], Juan Ramón Lama Ruiz1[0000-0003-1382-5274] and Ana de las Heras García de Vinuesa1[0000-0002-9884-7490] 1 Design Engineering Department, Polytechnic School, University of Seville, c/Virgen de África 7, 41010, Seville, Spain. ncuadrad[email protected] Abstract. In the midst of the Industry 4.0 revolution, there is an increasing number of new technological advances that promise to optimize productivity, and with the new Industry 5.0 proposal centered on the human being, an improvement in people's well-being is expected. Derived from this situation, it is pertinent to ask the question of whether these new technologies help or could help in the improvement of worker Occupational Safety and Health (OSH). Firstly, a search was carried out in the SCOPUS and WEB of SCIENCE bibliographic databases, using a set of key words to detect the relationship between these technologies and OSH. A quantitative and qualitative analysis was carried out on the selected articles, looking for whether these technologies favors OSH and in which area they have or will have a greater application. According to this study, it is possible to appreciate that the current interest in these technologies is more focused on risk assessment, and that the two most relevant technologies for OSH are Wearables and Artificial Intelligence. Keywords: Occupational Safety and Health, Physical Risks, Psychological Risks, Risk Assessment, Health and Safety Training, Wearables, Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, COBOT. 1 Introduction Amid the evolution towards the so-called Industry 5.0, where every day it is more common to observe news about advances or new technologies that can apparently help to improve people's wellbeing [1]. In this context, the question arises as to whether these new technologies will favors the improvement of workers Occupational Safety and Health (OSH), [2-3] and also to check in which area they would currently or in the future have a greater application: protection of physical and psychological risks, training or evaluation. The following objectives are proposed: 2 1. To check which of the 13 technologies studied are of most interest as OSH applications [4]. 2. To assess whether the interest of the studies carried out is to describe advantages or disadvantages, with the result that the advantages are more important. 3. Check which aspects of OSH are showing more interest in the application of different technologies and which technologies are the most relevant [4]. 2 Methodology Following a workshop conducted by the European Union on technological enablers for Industry 5.0 [5] served as a basis for the search for the main digital enablers that can or may be used in Industry 5.0, this study resulted in 13 enablers/technologies [5-11], which are as follows:  Wearable (WR), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Data (BD), Cloud computing (CC), Internet of Things (IoT), Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), COBOT/ROBOT, Blockchain (BC), Digital Twins (DT), Mixed Reality (MR), Cybersecurity (CS) and Additive Manufacturing (AM). With these 13 digital enablers, a bibliographic search was carried out in the SCOPUS and WEB of SCIENCE databases with the following criteria as shown in Figure 1 Fig. 1. Bibliographic search process of the relationship between new technologies and Health and Safety at Work. Source: Own elaboration From the result of this search, after cancelling common articles in the two databases, 243 articles were obtained from which a quantitative and qualitative analysis was carried out, for which each article was reviewed in two aspects: one if the article reflected advantages or disadvantages of the enabler or enablers with respect to OSH and a second aspect that refers to the main application that these technologies can benefit OSH, i.e. protection against physical and psychological risks, risk assessment or training in health and safety of workers. This double review is carried out using a Likert scale, with 4 values, that are: 0,1,3 and 5, on the one hand valuing its greater or lesser contribution to OSH choosing the value 5 the best valued, i.e. that in that publication of the technology or technologies that the article deals with indicates that it is very useful for 3 OSH, value 3 when it brings benefits but also specifies a series of drawbacks or warnings on which to watch out, value 1 if what is mostly indicated in the publication are negative aspects, i.e. warning about aspects to be taken into account and which may cause problems of that technology with regard to the safety and health of workers and finally the value 0 when no conclusion can be drawn, i.e. no reference is made to positive or negative aspects of any technology in the occupational safety and health environment. At the same time, a second evaluation is made in which it is analyzed whether the technology/technologies dealt with in this publication are oriented towards the protection of physical risks (Phys R), psychosocial risks (Phych R), whether they are aimed at risk assessment (EVAL) or training (TR) in health and safety at work, with the same evaluation criteria of 0, 1, 3 and 5, 0 if it does not contribute anything up to a value of 5 which would indicate only positive aspects, an example of an assessment can be seen in table 1. Table 2 shows some bibliographical references of the 243 analyzed, highlighting some of the advantages and disadvantages described and their application that served as a basis for the assessment given. Table 1. Example assessment with Likert Scale. Table 2. Examples of bibliography references that served as a basis for the assessment given. 3 Results and discussion An initial analysis of the 243 articles points out that interest has increased exponentially, with more than 66% of all publications having been published in the last 5 years, as can be seen in Figure 2. Reference Value AM AI AR VR MR BD CS BC CC DT IOT COBOT WR Phys R Psych R EVAL TR 8 ] 5 0000 0 00000 0 0 5 5 0 5 0 Enablers Advantages Aplications Reference Reduction of musculoskeletal disorders EVAL [12-17] Control demand levels based on worker physiological signals (e.g. respiratory rate, cardiovascular health) Phys R, Phych R, EVAL [18-19] Noise level detection EVAL [20] Warning and protection from electrical voltage hazards Phys R, [21] Respiratory hazards Phys R, EVAL [22] Disadvantages Aplications Reference The use of all data obtained from the advantages described above (intrusiveness, privacy, lack of ethics...) Phys R, Phych R, EVAL [23-27] Possible effects of the batteries that some of the wearables may use. Phys R, EVAL [28] Problems of comfort, discomfort, unreliable results. Phys R, EVAL [29-30] Effects of magnetic fields that may be generated by some wearables. Phys R [31] Unreliable results due to temperature effects and other factors. Phys R, EVAL [32-34] Lack of awareness of their use Phys R [35] We arable 4 In a second analysis, it is observed on which technology there has been more interest/application with respect to OSH, resulting that Wearables technology together with Artificial Intelligence [36] are the two on which there has been more interest followed closely by Virtual Reality [37] and Robots [38], as can be seen in Figure 3. Fig. 2. Evolution of publications of new technologies with OSH. Source: Own elaboration Fig. 3. Interest of new technologies with OSH. Source: Own elaboration 71213 49 162 1980-1999 2003-2007 2009-2013 2014-2018 2019-2023 Number of publications Publication Year 50 46 38 38 31 30 24 17 75432 Number of publications Technologies 5 Based on the Likert scale assessment, different results were obtained, which are described below, the first is that 60.49 % of the articles reflect advantages of these technologies with respect to OSH, with 24.79 % reflecting positive and negative aspects and only 5.7 % indicating negative aspects, as can be seen in Figure 4 Fig. 4. Number of publications according to the result of the evaluation carried out Source: Own elaboration. Fig. 5. Number of publications according to the result of their evaluation and year of publication Source: Own elaboration. 23 14 59 147 0135 Number of publications Rating Rating: 0 no contribution, 1 negative aspects, 3 positive and negative aspects, 5 positive aspects 13271022100469 40 455 31 102 1980-1999 2003-2007 2009-2013 2014-2018 2019-2023 Number of publicationes/rating Publication Year Rating: 0 no contribution, 1 negative aspects, 3 positive and negative aspects, 5 positive aspects 0135 6 A more detailed analysis of the results of this point, taking into account the publications of the last 10 years, shows that there is an increase in the number of publications indicating advantages and disadvantages (from 18 to 39 %), which is slightly contrary to what was said above, this could be due to the fact that the data (from 49 articles to 162) may be more realistic, but it could also be due to the greater knowledge of these technologies that has been gained over the years, which makes it possible to know much better the problems that these new technologies can generate, which will have to be solved [39-40]. Another of the aspects mentioned above which is also analyzed is to check in which aspects of OSH, i.e. protection against physical risks, protection against psychological risks, risk assessment or OSH training, the use of the different technologies analyzed is most focused, It turns out that the greatest application of new technologies at the moment is for risk assessment (EVAL) (40.65%), followed by protection against physical risks (PHYS R) (34.09%), thirdly for OSH training (TR) (16.72%) and lastly and more distantly for protection against psychological risks (PHYCH R) (8.5%). All this can be seen in Figure 6. Fig. 6. Number of publications according to their OSH application. Source: Own elaboration. It should be noted from these results that at first it seems that the least application of these technologies is for the prevention of psychological risks, although these are one of the risks that are being considered and are the most likely to arise with the introduction of these new technologies, including, for example, intrusion into personal life, fear of losing one's job, technostress, etc. [41-43]. 124 104 51 26 EVAL PHYS R TR PHYCH R Number of publications OSH Issues 7 Finally, within each of these four applications, the technologies that offer the most advantages are analyzed using the Likert scale, which shows that for risk assessment, the technologies that are being used the most or that arouse the greatest interest for their application are Wearables, Artificial Intelligence and Big Data [44], for protection against physical risks are Wearables, COBOT/ROBOT and the Internet of Things [45- 46], for training, one technology stands out above the rest, which is Virtual Reality [47- 48] and finally, for psychological risks, Wearables, Artificial Intelligence and Big Data [19], all of which can be seen in Figure 7 and 8. Fig. 7. Assessment of each technology for the prevention of physical and psychological risks Source: Own elaboration 14 70 13 104 11 98 10 108 89 8 27 5143 46 0503030013 75 PSYCH R PHYS R BD WR COBOT BC IOT VR AR CC DT CS AM MR AI 8 Fig. 8. Assessment of each technology for occupational health and safety training and risk evaluation. Source: Own Elaboration 4 Conclusions Before summarizing the main conclusions of the above results, it should be pointed out that these results are limited to data obtained from only two databases and that the search performed only relates different technologies in isolation to the term OSH without any other requirement to further specify the workspace. The main conclusions that can be drawn from the above results are as follows:  There is an increased interest in the application of new technologies in OSH, with the number of publications almost tripling in the last 5 years.  Four technologies stand out above the rest as good for OSH improvement, which are the use of wearables (WR), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR) and COBOTs [12].  A high percentage of the articles indicate the advantages of using these technologies.  The main application of the different enablers is for the evaluation of occupational risks (40.65%) followed by the prevention of physical risks (34.09%), in third place, for training in the prevention of occupational risks (16.72%) and finally and more distant for the prevention of psychological risks (8.52%), the latter being one of the new risks produced by the using of these new technologies.  Within each application the technologies of most interest for occupational risk assessment are WR, IA and BD, for physical risks WR, COBOT/ROBOT and IoT, for training VR and for psychosocial risks BD, WR and IA [4]. 19 126 8 142 020 23 80 140 56 39 40 13 80 5153533 25 10 32 138 13 31 TR EVAL BD WR BC IOT VR AR CC DT CS AM MR AI COBOT 9 From all these conclusions, an important future line of research opens up, which would be to develop a methodology or framework that could ensure that all the risks that can be produced by these new technologies are taken into account, using them and taking into account especially psychosocial risks. 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