Part of the mission of construction equipment upgrades and new releases of construction technology is decreasing the chances of operator error. Because, as guys on the jobsite know, as operator error is decreased, efficiency and productivity increase.
But a research team from the University of Calgary recently discovered that operator error can also occur before the work even begins. They found that morning toolbox meetings “lacked effectiveness and enthusiasm” and that by and large, the supervisors heading up these meetings were not delivering the day’s work agenda in the most understandable way.
Headed up by civil engineering professor and Canada research chair of project management systems Janaka Ruwanpura, the University of Calgary team has spent the last five or six years developing a solution: the i-Booth kiosk.
“This is the future of construciton for navigating information,” Ruwanpura recently told Equipment World. “[Team members on the jobsite] are desperate for more information. We have found that they waste a lot of time searching for information, drawings and details because they don’t have access to that information right away.”
“With i-Booth, you can look for that information and you can make decisions very quickly. It’s all connected to each other.”
Short for “Information Booth,” the i-Booth kiosk, now in its second generation of design, comes in two variants, both of which are dominated by a 42-inch touchscreen display. The first is a wall-mounted unit with a body a little thicker than the first flat-screen TVs. The second is the mobile i-Booth, a stand-up unit on wheels for moving about the jobsite. Ruwanpura said the research team is aiming to commerically release the i-Booth kiosk in the fall of this year.
But as Lahiru Silva, the Ph.D. candidate and team member who designed the i-Booth said, the hardware would be nothing without the proper software. The research team behind the i-Booth found that general contractors lose between 180 and 200 minutes per supervisory team member per day in what it calls “ineffective information management subsystems.” To fix that, the team designed a software framework specifically for contractors and team members to minimize time wasted looking for, sharing and then acting upon information on a jobsite.
