In dangerous and high-risk workplaces such as the construction and emergency response sectors, monitoring is crucial to ensure the health and safety of employees. Current health and safety systems often rely on self-reporting models, incident records, or lagging indicators of safety culture, which all fail to capture the real-time physiological indicators of unsafe performance states.
The current system poses a significant threat to employees and the overall workplace environment, which is why Professor Jennifer Dimoff has been awarded a Telfer SMRG Research Development Grant for her project titled “Wearable Analytics and Biological Sex Differences: Infrastructure for Safer Work Systems.”
Dimoff’s goal is to develop infrastructure that advances occupational safety and performance reliability through the integration of physiological monitoring via wearable technology and pre-preventative predictive analysis.
By developing a data-driven framework that uses biological and physiological indicators of fatigue, stress, and recovery, to identify, predict, and prevent performance declines linked to workplace accidents, Dimoff will help transform occupational safety into a more reliable and scientifically grounded system.
Furthermore, prior research within occupational safety research often neglects the key biological sex-based differences in physiological stress responses, recovery trajectories, and fatigue patterns. Dimoff’s research will focus on understanding these differences to enable the development of more equitable safety systems and recovery designs, contributing to more inclusive and effective prevention strategies.
By going beyond self-reports and visible environmental factors, Dimoff’s research will innovate the crucially underdeveloped workplace safety system towards a pre-preventative predictive analysis model that is inclusive of key biological sex-based differences, ensuring proper health and safety measures for all.
