Digital Safety Monitoring and Inspection in Construction: A Systematic Review of Deployment Readiness and Adoption Barriers

Digital technologies such as sensing systems, computer vision, and data analytics are increasingly proposed to support safety monitoring and inspection on construction sites. Despite rapid technological advances, their adoption in practice remains uneven. Existing review studies have primarily cataloged technological innovations but provided limited insight into how these tools align with onsite inspection workflows and managerial decision-making. This study addresses this gap by reframing digital safety monitoring and inspection as a managerial implementation challenge rather than a purely technical problem. A systematic literature review of 297 publications was conducted using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) framework, combining bibliometric analysis with inductive content analysis. The results identified six domains of onsite safety monitoring and inspection activities and 17 technology-assisted tasks. Deployment readiness was evaluated across these domains based on reported validation settings, operational robustness, and integration feasibility with existing inspection practices. To explain the persistent research–practice gap, adoption barriers were synthesized using the technology–organization–environment (TOE) framework. The analysis showed that implementation constraints cluster around technical reliability, organizational readiness, and governance conditions. Workflow integration emerged as a key cross-cutting challenge linking technological capability with managerial feasibility. By organizing digital safety research around inspection activities rather than technologies, the study provides an activity-centered deployment readiness map and a management-oriented synthesis of adoption barriers. The findings offer guidance for researchers, contractors, and industry stakeholders seeking to develop and implement digital safety solutions that are operationally deployable and aligned with construction management practices.