How can we construct safer homes, buildings, and infrastructure? This is the task at hand for many construction companies. We are in the middle of a blog series, looking at how contractors can improve safety, in areas such as the jobsite. Today, let’s look at how builders can build safer structures.
Perhaps this goes without saying that all homes, buildings, and infrastructure should be built to meet rigorous safety standards and codes. For today’s blog, let’s look beyond that and examine how technology can help make occupants feel safer at home, at work, and on the road.
Homes
The demand for home-security systems is being driven by homebuyers’ desire to be connected and the increasing rates of crimes. These systems provide the opportunity to keep homes safer and secure—and the technology is being more widely expected by today’s homeowners.
As such, the home security market is expected to grow 7% between 2021 and 2026, according to Mordor Intelligence. With this, we are seeing the rise in voice assistants, video doorbells, and more. In the future, AI (artificial intelligence) has the potential to play a bigger role in home-security systems. The hope here is AI combined with ML (machine learning) could potentially reduce the chances of false alarms, while also detecting anomalous activities, while offering better video verification and surveillance capabilities.
Buildings
In addition to security systems, buildings are evolving into “safe buildings.” At its core, a safe building is one that uses technologies and practices to ensure a safe environment for occupants. Following the pandemic, the definition of this has expanded to include “healthy buildings.”
Cognizant suggests there are numerous benefits to safe buildings including being able to immediately detect threats and exposure to potential pathogens in the workplace; increasing employee and customer confidence through shareable safety metrics; improving efficiency in managing, monitoring, and reinforcing health and safety protocols; and flexibly managing risks and liabilities with proactive prevention strategies and reporting guided by data privacy controls and compliance standards.
The advances in the technology also come at a time when the costs of the systems are coming down, which is all driving the rise in these systems in buildings. All this to say, buildings are becoming more connected—and builders are more often expected to provide these safety capabilities in buildings.
Infrastructure
Safe infrastructure is essential for nearly every person. It impacts our airports, bridges, dams, drinking water, energy, rail, roads, schools, transit, and so much more. To ensure our infrastructure is safe for generations to come, we must use new approaches, materials, and technologies to ensure our infrastructure can withstand or recover quickly from natural or man-made hazards, according to the ASCE (American Society of Civil Engineers).
The ASCE suggests we can do this by incentivizing and enforcing the use of codes and standards; prioritizing projects that improve the safety and security of systems and communities; and enhance the resilience of various infrastructure sectors by including or enhancing natural or green infrastructure, just to name a few. Sensors and AI can all help to make infrastructure a little bit safer by providing much-needed data about how a structure is holding up—and this is just one example.
Next week, let’s wrap up this series, as we look to the road to zero, and how the implementation of technology might help to heighten road safety and to reduce traffic fatalities and construction deaths.
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