# Impacts of Drone Distractions on Working Safety at Heights in Construction > **NIH ALLCDC R21** · UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON · 2024 · $169,012 ## Abstract PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT The overall objective of this project is to investigate how the presence of a drone (visual appearance and/or flying sound) in a construction field distracts workers at heights and impacts their working safety. Two hypotheses are proposed. The first hypothesis is that the drone presence diverts the workers’ visual attention, so that they may not recognize the hazards of leading edges and unguarded openings on floors as they normally can. The second hypothesis is that the drone presence requests extra effort from the workers to keep their balance while working at sloped surfaces. To test both hypotheses, two experiments are designed and conducted. In the first experiment, 24 test participants are involved. Each participant is asked to wear an eye-tracking headset and pick and place a box (7.5 kg) in virtual construction scenes under different drone flying conditions. The fixation-related metrics, i.e., fixation time and fixation count, are calculated to measure the participant’s visual attention on the recognition of leading edges and unguarded openings. In the second experiment, 12 test participants are involved. Each participant is asked to mimic the shingling task on the roof simulator under different combinations of postures, slopes, and drone interventions. The body’s Center of Pressure, Center of Gravity, and Base of Support are used to measure the participant’s efforts on keeping balance during the shingling task. The measurements from both experiments are further analyzed through statistical tests. This way, the quantitative relationships between a flying drone and its impacts on distracting construction workers at heights can be established. These quantitative relationships will be the main outcome of this project. They will build a solid foundation to help the occupational safety and health community create guidelines and regulations on drone use in construction workplaces. This project is expected to contribute to addressing the NORA Construction Sector "Strategic Goal 6: Improving workplace safety to reduce traumatic injuries” with the focus on “Intermediate Goal 6.3: Injuries related to emerging technologies (e.g., robots and exoskeletons)”. Also, the research team in this project will collaborate with construction contractors in Wisconsin and West Virginia. Based on the results and findings from this project, they will work together to 1) identify what policies could be taken to control the impacts of the drone- induce distractions on construction workers, 2) transform these policies into best practices in the construction industry, 3) assess these policies and best practices in real construction workplaces, and 4) disseminate and share the practices disseminate and share the practices through the NIOSH Traumatic Injury Prevention Program and/or with other construction companies to fulfill the NIOSH r2P initiative's efforts. ## Key facts - **NIH application ID:** 10932091 - **Project number:** 5R21OH012455-02 - **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON - **Principal Investigator:** Zhenhua Zhu - **Activity code:** R21 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.) - **Funding institute:** ALLCDC - **Fiscal year:** 2024 - **Award amount:** $169,012 - **Award type:** 5 - **Project period:** 2023-09-30 → 2025-09-29 ## Primary source NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10932091 ## Citation > US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10932091, Impacts of Drone Distractions on Working Safety at Heights in Construction (5R21OH012455-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10932091. Licensed CC0. --- *[NIH grants dataset](/datasets/nih-grants) · CC0 1.0*