Balancing privacy and occupational safety and health in construction: A blockchain-enabled P-OSH deployment framework

Highlights

• In pursuing OSH, privacy as a core value is often traded away.

• Blockchain technology has unexplored potential to protect privacy.

• This study develops a blockchain-enabled P-OSH framework to balance privacy and OSH.

• Personal privacy data and non-sensitive safety behavior data are separated.

• Consortium blockchain and private blockchain are jointly applied in the P-OSH system.

Abstract

It is an unfortunate fact that, in pursuing occupational safety and health (OSH), privacy as a core value is often traded away. Blockchain technology has unexplored potential in tackling this dilemma through its cryptography, decentralization, and consensus mechanisms. This research aims to develop a blockchain-enabled framework to balance privacy protection and advancement of OSH management by focusing on the construction industry. It does so by adopting design science research as the overall methodology, under which specific methods such as literature review, industrial engagement, brainstorming, cross-sectoral learning, case study, and prototyping and experiment are organized. Underpinning the framework is the principle that personal privacy data should be encrypted, classified, and safeguarded in decentralized repositories while non-sensitive safety behavior data should be readily accessible to enable OSH management. Based on the principle, a blockchain-enabled deployment framework of privacy protection in OSH management named P-OSH is proposed. Its functional layers and protocols are elaborated. Through a series of prototyping and experiments in a modular construction project case study, it is found out that the framework, with proper deployment, can be developed into an operable P-OSH system to minimize the risk of infringing workers’ privacy without undermining OSH management. The major contributions of this research are: (a) highlighting the importance of privacy protection while pursuing OSH excellence; (b) devising an information channeling mechanism; and (c) developing a deployable P-OSH framework. The research lays a steppingstone for further studies and practical explorations that apply blockchain technology in OSH management without sacrificing privacy.

Introduction

Occupational safety and health (OSH), also known as occupational health and safety (OHS) or workplace health and safety (WHS), concerns the physical, mental, and social well-being of workers in all occupations (Archer et al., 2017). Globally, more than 2.78 million people die and 374 million suffer from non-fatal injuries each year from workplace-related accidents or diseases (ILO, 2021). The occupational fatality rate of the construction industry is five times higher than that of the manufacturing industry (Sawacha et al., 1999), making it one of the most hazardous industries (Pinto et al., 2011). For centuries, efforts have been made from institutional, managerial, cultural, and technological perspectives to reduce construction accidents (Tam et al., 2004). Niu et al. (2019) summarized these efforts into three waves, the first relying on ‘hard’ protection using personal protective equipment (PPE), the second emphasizing ‘soft’ safety training and education, and the third exploiting advanced smart technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of things (IoT), big data analytics, and robotics. Examples of smart technology applications include computer vision (CV) (Fang et al., 2020), building information modelling (BIM) and IoT integration (Asadzadeh et al., 2020, Niu et al., 2019), mobile computing (Zhang et al., 2017a), wearable technologies (Awolusi et al., 2018), and virtual/augmented reality (Li et al., 2018, Shi et al., 2019). However, in the rush to exploit advanced smart technologies to enhance construction OSH, privacy is often sacrificed, making such solutions a ‘pyrrhic triumph’ (Nnaji & Karakhan, 2020).

The private information of a person can include identities such as name and/or staff number (Park & Kim, 2013), facial features or eye movement (Medapati et al., 2020), body posture (Han & Lee, 2013), real-time location (Fang et al., 2020), travel history (Ioannou et al., 2020), or even tastes and preferences (Cohen, 2012). Privacy protection matters because it is a major component of social norms and laws (McCreary, 2008). However, it is often traded away for ‘good causes’ such as security, safety, efficiency, or productivity. Surveillance has expanded in the workplace and beyond, from the watchfulness of Taylor’s scientific management to the ‘omnipticon’ where the many watch the many (Sprague, 2007). In the COVID-19 era, creeping surveillance and vaccine passports, for example, have been disputed or even bitterly resisted as infringements of privacy despite being instituted for public health and safety reasons. Privacy issues related to technologies has been recently brought out. Ahn et al. (2019) noted the privacy risks of wearable sensing technology applications, while Nnaji and Karakhan (2020) identified unguaranteed privacy as a key limitation of advanced technologies. In the workplace, the use of ethical technologies together with regulations to protect privacy while pursuing OSH is high on the agenda. It is against this backdrop that blockchain technology is gaining attention.

Literally, blockchain is a set of blocks chained in a network of participants. It is a decentralized, encrypted, and distributed peer-to-peer digital ledger comprising an ordered set of connected and replicated blocks of data for verifiable, immutable, and incorruptible transaction recording (Hughes et al., 2019, Karamchandani et al., 2020). Its core characteristics are immutability, decentralization, and traceability enabled by the use of a distributed peer-to-peer digital ledger, secured cryptographic algorithms, and a consensus mechanism (Hughes et al., 2019, Xue and Lu, 2020). The technology has shown great promise in privacy protection because of the distributed ledger, cryptography, and consensus mechanism. For example, Zhang and Lin (2018) apply blockchain to cloud-based electronic health-record sharing to preserve patients’ privacy, Gai et al. (2019) to smart grid energy trading to preserve user’s privacy, and Zhang et al. (2020) to smart meters in a smart home to protect residents’ privacy.

In the context of construction, Nawari and Ravindran (2019) pointed out that the implementation of blockchain could transform construction industry culture, enhance efficiencies, and drive future advancements. Perera et al. (2020) showed the prospects of blockchain in construction and property management. Other studies have reported empirical blockchain applications in construction, such as minimization of information redundancy for BIM and blockchain integration (Xue & Lu, 2020), smart construction objects as blockchain oracles (Lu et al., 2021a), integrated physical and financial supply chains (Hamledari & Fischer, 2021), modular construction supply chain (Li et al., 2022), and governmental supervision of construction work (Lu et al., 2021b). However, there is little research, if any, which has explored the use of blockchain technology to balance privacy protection while advancing smart construction excellence.

This paper aims to tackle the issue of balancing privacy protection and OSH management in construction by applying blockchain technology. It adopts the design science research as the overarching methodology. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 is to elaborate the methodology. Section 3 reviews the literature related to privacy and privacy infringement risks in OSH management and Section 4 reviews the blockchain basics and its affordances for privacy protection. Section 5 proposes the blockchain-enabled P-OSH system. A prototype of the system is developed in Section 6 and discussion and conclusions are made in 7 Discussion, 8 Conclusions, respectively.