With the rapid development of wearable sensing technologies, their applications in construction safety and health have gained increasing scholarly attention. However, no umbrella review has systematically synthesized higher-order evidence to identify its benefits, challenges, and future research directions. This study presents an umbrella review of 16 review-level studies, selected through a PRISMA-guided process and appraised using established quality criteria. The review consolidates fragmented knowledge to examine publication trends, methodological contributions, and thematic outcomes in WST research for construction. The findings highlight three benefits of WSTs: supporting real-time decision-making and task optimization, enhancing safety and health monitoring through physiological, postural, and environmental sensing, and enabling multimodal integration for comprehensive worker status assessment. At the same time, three challenges persist: wearability and stability limitations that reduce user acceptance, signal artifacts and data quality issues that compromise reliability, and the lack of large-scale field validation restricting scalability. Building on these findings, this review identifies three main research gaps. Future studies should develop ecologically valid multimodal datasets under real construction conditions, advance methodological approaches such as hybrid modeling and explainable AI with standardized validation protocols, and prioritize ergonomic, user-centered WST designs to improve long-term adoption. This is the first umbrella review to classify the advantages and limitations of WSTs in construction safety and health. By articulating key benefits, challenges, and research gaps, this review offers actionable guidance for researchers, technology developers, and industry practitioners aiming to advance reliable, scalable, and worker-centered deployment of wearable sensing technologies in construction.
Huang et al. (Thu,) studied this question.