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Construction jobs are more labor-intensive compared to other industries. As such, construction workers are often required to exceed their natural physical capability to cope with the increasing complexity and challenges in this industry. Over long periods of time, this sustained physical labor causes bodily injuries to the workers which in turn, conveys huge losses to the industry in terms of money, time, and productivity. Various safety and health organizations have established rules and regulations that limit the amount and intensity of workers' physical movements to mitigate work-related bodily injuries. A precursor to enforcing and implementing such regulations and improving the ergonomics conditions on the jobsite is to identify physical risks associated with a particular task. Manually assessing a field activity to identify the ergonomic risks is not trivial and often requires extra effort which may render it to be challenging if not impossible. In this paper, a low-cost ubiquitous approach is presented and validated which deploys built-in smartphone sensors to unobtrusively monitor workers' bodily postures and autonomously identify potential work-related ergonomic risks. Results indicates that measurements of trunk and shoulder flexions of a worker by smartphone sensory data are very close to corresponding measurements by observation. The proposed method is applicable for workers in various occupations who are exposed to WMSDs due to awkward postures. Examples include, but are not limited to industry laborers, carpenters, welders, farmers, health assistants, teachers, and office workers.

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With the rapid advancement of sensing and computing technology and the wide adoption of mobile computing, the construction industry has faced a rise in the amount of information and data generated during the lifecycle of the construction project. To deal with a large variety of project data and information to support efficient and effective decision making, visualization, information modeling, and simulation (VIMS) has become critical in the development of capital facilities and infrastructures. The objective of this paper is to identify and investigate grand challenges in VIMS for the construction industry, to assist the academic and industry communities in establishing a future research agenda to solve VIMS challenges. In particular, 17 VIMS grand challenges were identified by an expert task force in the VIMS committee of the ASCE Computing and Information Technology Division, and then VIMS experts in the civil and construction areas from both academia and industry participated in a survey to assess the identified challenges, examine the relative importance of the identified challenges, and investigate current practices and future directions of VIMS. The survey results indicate that several knowledge gaps regarding VIMS challenges between academia and industry still exist, and it is the contention of this research that these particular gaps need to be addressed in future research. These research directions apply to technical issues and sociological/cultural/organizational issues in VIMS challenges. The major contribution of this paper is its claim that the provision of shared views on VIMS challenges lays a firm foundation in which collaborative actions between academia and industry can take place, which will, in turn, advance VIMS for the construction industry. By incorporating the whole project lifecycle, not only project execution but also planning, operation, and maintenance, the analysis provides meaningful hints for VIMS challenges in architecture, engineering, and facility management industries.