Safeguarding Workers in High-Risk Environments: Digital Technologies, Human Factors, and Regulatory Interventions for Occupational Health

Workers in high-risk sectors such as construction, oil and gas, and the process industries continue to carry a disproportionate burden of injury and long-term ill health, despite decades of regulation and safety management practice. Closing the gap between identifying a hazard and delivering an intervention that measurably protects health remains one of the central challenges in occupational and environmental health research.A substantial share of serious incidents traces back to human and organizational factors rather than technical failure alone. Frameworks for classifying human error and cognitive failure have advanced considerably, and evidence increasingly links safety culture, worker behaviour, and organizational commitment to health outcomes. Yet translating these insights into interventions that change behaviour at the workface, particularly in small and medium-sized enterprises with limited resources, remains difficult.Digital safety technologies have been widely promoted as a solution. Wearable monitoring devices, sensing systems, and digital design and management tools offer real-time visibility of exposure and risk that was previously unattainable. Their real-world effectiveness, however, is constrained by worker acceptance and habit, data governance concerns, and the financial barriers facing smaller firms. Understanding this socio-technical gap, rather than assuming technology adoption alone delivers protection, is essential to designing interventions that work in practice.Regulation and the economics of prevention form a third, under-researched dimension. The relationship between regulatory compliance, enforcement activity, penalties, and actual health outcomes is poorly quantified, as is the business case for preventive investment. Evidence here is directly actionable for both policymakers and employers.Finally, the physical work environment is itself changing. Rising ambient temperatures and more frequent heat events are creating occupational exposures for which regulatory frameworks remain fragmented and inconsistent across jurisdictions, and the health consequences of thermal conditions in and around buildings extend to vulnerable populations beyond the workforce itself.This Research Topic seeks contributions that connect hazard and exposure evidence to concrete, evaluable interventions protecting worker health in high-risk environments. Potential topics include but are not limited to:• Evaluation of digital safety technologies, including wearables and sensing systems, in real-world high-risk workplaces, including barriers to adoption and effectiveness in resource-constrained firms.• Human and organizational factors in occupational incidents, including error classification frameworks, cognitive failure analysis, and their application to prevention.• Safety culture, behavioural interventions, and worker engagement as determinants of occupational health outcomes.• Regulatory frameworks, compliance, and enforcement: their measurable effect on worker health, and the economics of preventive investment.• Occupational heat stress and thermal exposure, including comparative analysis of regulatory approaches to working in hot environments.• Environmental hazards in the built environment affecting occupational and public health, including fire safety, indoor environmental quality, and building performance.• Interventions targeting small and medium-sized enterprises, where resource constraints limit conventional approaches to occupational health protection.We welcome Original Research, Reviews, Mini-Reviews, Methods, and Perspectives that advance evidence-based intervention design in occupational and environmental health. Topic editors: Andrew Oyen Arewa, Haruna Musa Moda, Stephen Chukwubuikem Theophilus Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/86569/safeguarding-workers-in-high-risk-environments-digital-technologies-human-factors-and-regulatory-interventions-for-occupational-health