Immersive Occupational Safety and Health Training: A Modular Virtual Reality-Based Process and Platform

For several decades, safety and health have been major concerns in the warehousing, logistics, and manufacturing sectors. Each year, operational fatalities, injuries, and accidents cause unrecoverable losses and huge financial costs. Despite considerable advancements in methods, tools, equipment, and regulations, there has been no substantial reduction in accidents, particularly those of a fatal four. As a result, safety professionals and researchers have explored new and innovative ways to combat the problem. In most settings engaging workers in significant muscular activity and/or requiring workers to operate in risky environments, there is an occurrence of short-term safety incidents and/or long-term health concerns. Long-term health training is barely discussed in the literature compared to short-term safety training. This is because health issues are more complex than safety issues since biological outcomes may take time to develop, are affected by multiple resources, and may be induced by cumulative injuries. This paper contributes to workers' health and safety by introducing an immersive training methodology enabled by a virtual reality platform. A modular virtual reality training platform (MVR-P) was developed, and a со-design process was applied to design each module. Three main modules related to safety training for the warehouse were considered namely the personal protection equipment module, pallet handling module, and pallet repairing module. In this platform, virtual interactive environments provide a solid training environment and generate syntactic data for evaluating long-term health risks. On the other hand, collaborative modular environments provide a solution to geographically distributed systems, which allows employees to connect and train remotely.