Occupational Safety Training for Hunter Roberts

Project Details
A project coordinated with NIOSH for Hunter Roberts Construction Group.
Project Goals
The goal of the project was to provide Hunter Roberts with occupational safety training.
Project Results
Launched two m-health and m-learning campaigns, using a cloud-based tool that automatically prepares content for broadcast to cell phone.

“Multimedia messaging is an easily understood, effective, and low-burden way to reach target populations via text, audio, and video.”
Project Overview
In late 2012/early 2013, Cell Podium conducted a study for NIOSH to evaluate the feasibility cell phone multimedia as a mechanism to disseminate occupational safety refresher training for construction safety. Cell Podium collaborated with the Hunter Roberts Construction Group. Hunter Roberts maintains an “Incident & Injury-Free” (IIF) safety initiative, which strives to eliminate danger at construction work sites through a highly personal approach that shifts focus away from a compliance requirement to a concern for workers’ health and welfare.

The Cell Podium – Hunter Roberts collaboration consisted of deploying a mobile multimedia campaign on occupational safety at a Hunter Roberts construction site.
Project Execution
Hunter Roberts selected for the mobile campaign thirteen topics aligned with its IFF training material: electrical safety, fall protection, forklift safety, hoisting safety, reporting injuries, keeping clean, ladder safety, material safety, personal protective equipment, scaffolding safety, stairway safety, utility safety, and solicitation for comments.

A campaign was designed with thirteen 60-second videos, one on each of the aforementioned topics. CellPodium configured three campaigns in the CMS, each with the same broadcast dates (approximately two videos per week), but differing in the broadcast time and enrollment keyword. Upon receiving one of these keywords, the CMS would assign the sender’s caller-ID to the campaign with the associated broadcast time. Similarly, upon receiving the keyword “stop”, “end”, or “quit”, the CMS would remove the sender from all broadcasts.
Project Impact
Analysis of the 2012 Pew Health Tracking survey dataset (Pew 2012) reveals that (1) fewer than half the households with income under $20,000/year have access to the internet, and (2) the majority of adults without access to the internet own traditional cell phones, i.e., feature phones and not the more expensive smartphone models. This analysis confirms that cell phone adoption exceeds Internet adoption particularly among vulnerable populations, and quantifies the significance of delivering public health multimedia to the feature phones of this demographic without access to the Internet. For almost one third of households making under $20,000/year, or one quarter of households making under $40,000/year, this may be the only option to deliver public health multimedia.

Construction worker salaries in New Jersey average $46,670/year (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2013), implying that roughly 60% of cell phones owned by construction workers do not have Internet access and can only receive video broadcasts in the form of interoperable MMS. The CMS thus enables just-in-time access to a significant population that is disconnected from the mobile Internet.