Adoption of IoT and Wearable Devices as a Socio-Technical System: Insights from Construction Safety

The use of the Internet of Things (IoT) and wearable devices to enhance construction safety has recently attracted growing attention from the construction research community. In this paper, a system-level Structural Equation Model (SEM) is proposed to examine the relationships among perceived Safety System Value (SSV), Organizational Readiness (OR), and Adoption Barriers (AB). A survey of 567 construction professionals in Saudi Arabia was used to collect the data, which was analyzed using covariance-based SEM with Robust Maximum Likelihood (MLR) estimation. SSV was found to act as a perceptual antecedent of OR (β = 0.719). OR, in turn, was found to strongly affect AB (β = 0.712). The direct effect of SSV on AB was statistically significant (β = 0.191). Furthermore, the mediation analysis showed that approximately 73% of the total effect of SSV on AB is transmitted through OR (indirect β = 0.512, total β = 0.703). The model explained 51.6% of the variance in OR and 73.9% of the variance in AB. Data were collected through a structured questionnaire survey of 567 construction professionals in Saudi Arabia. This research contributes to the broader field of systems research by presenting a framework for the adoption of safety-related construction technologies as a systems phenomenon. The research has practical implications for building readiness-driven approaches for the effective integration of safety technologies in safety-critical construction environments.