A Project Framework to Introduce Virtual Reality in Construction Health and Safety

Building construction is considered a complex, dynamic and highly hazardous process which embraces many factors that are potentially dangerous to workers. Many studies proved that the improvement of preventive and proactive measures -dynamically included in the building design, planning and construction- could reduce site accidents as well as increase the site productivity. In this context, process management models and information visualization techniques such as Building Information Modelling (BIM) and Virtual Reality (VR) seem to be devoted to strongly contribute to the advancement of the current safety management practices. For this reasons, the presented contribution starts with a short review of the adoption of BIM and BIM-related digital technologies for risk management together with VR application for Construction Health and Safety which aim to generate immersive environments from which workers can experience safe insights into the way the real construction site works. The main objective of this contribution is to review existing proposals in this field of construction health and safety as related to ICT technologies, especially BIM and Virtual Reality, in order to propose, at the end, a project framework able to guide future researches and applications on the use of BIM-enabled Virtual Reality for Safety purposes for site design validation and related workers' training.