Wearables, and the Quiet Erosion of Site Wellbeing

Wearables can bring many benefits including real-time alerts for heat stress, proximity warnings for moving plant, even fatigue monitoring. But it also unpacks a growing unease: the same data that can prevent accidents can be used to micromanage, penalise, and ultimately, dehumanise.

We’ve seen this story before in other sectors: warehouse workers pushed to exhaustion by algorithmic targets, delivery drivers tracked down to the second. Now, construction’s entering the chat.

It’s not hard to imagine the following… A subcontractor spends too long talking through a snag or sorting a plan. An AI flags them for “low productivity” because standing still isn’t work the algorithm can recognise. Their data says they’re slow. The AI says, replaceable.

That’s not safety. That’s surveillance.

Data: safety’s friend or management’s weapon?

For anyone interested in this topic there is an amazing paper on this topic — Sherratt, F., Ivory, C., & Sherratt, S. (2025). “The Digitalization of UK Construction Labour: Wearables and Workers, But Where Is the Wellbeing?

One of the most sobering parts of Sherratt et al.’s work is their exploration of “data creep.” Information gathered for safety can be repurposed intentionally or otherwise for cost-saving, performance monitoring, or even disciplinary action. The authors draw parallels to the infamous blacklisting scandals in UK construction, where personal data was weaponised to exclude and control.

And let’s not forget: construction workers are rightly skeptical. As Sherratt’s research points out, there is no trust without transparency, and wearables especially when introduced top-down, rarely come with either.

Workers are asking:

• Who owns my data?

•  Who sees it?

•  How can it be used against me?

These are not paranoid questions. They are, frankly, smart ones.

A ficticious binary: cyborgs or unsafe sites?

We’re being sold a false choice: either digitise the human to make sites safe or accept the risks. Instead of turning operatives into sensor-laden cyborgs, what if we made the environment safer? What if we invested in culture as much as kit? What if technology existed to empower the worker and not monitor them?

Wearables might help detect fatigue, sure. But they can’t replace a culture where a foreman or forewoman simply notices that someone’s off and takes them aside for a chat.

The danger isn’t the tech. It’s the assumption that the tech is enough.

Let’s not be “Useful Idiots”

This phrase from the chapter stuck with me. In our enthusiasm to digitise, to modernise, to “solve” construction’s productivity problem, we risk becoming exactly that.. useful idiots, paving the way for unintended harm under the banner of progress.

As builders of tech, we must tread carefully. Wearables are not neutral tools. They carry embedded values with who they serve, who they surveil, and who gets to decide what “performance” looks like.

Construction 4.0 must not be an era where we swap muddy boots for metadata and forget the human in the hard hat. If we lose the trust of our site teams in the process, all the tech in the world won’t save us.

Let’s innovate with care. Let’s design with empathy. Let’s deploy digital tools with workers, not to them.

And above all, let’s never confuse what we can measure with what really matters.

Article inspired by and based on:

Sherratt, F., Ivory, C., & Sherratt, S. (2025). “The Digitalization of UK Construction Labour: Wearables and Workers, But Where Is the Wellbeing?” in Digitized Management — What Can We Learn from England and Sweden?