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Hot and humid climates (HHCs) are potential environmental hazards that directly affect construction workers' health and safety (HS) and negatively impact workers' productivity. Extensive research efforts have addressed the effects of HHCs. However, these efforts have been inconsistent in their approach for selecting factors influencing workers in such conditions. There are also increasing concerns about the drop-off in research interest to follow through intrusive and non-real-time measurements. This review aims to identify the major research gaps in measurements applied in previous research with careful attention paid to the factors that influence the intrusiveness and selection of the applied data collection methods.

This research integrates a manual subjective discussion with a thematic analysis of Leximancer software and an elaborating chronological, geographical and methodological review that yielded 701 articles and 76 peer-reviewed most related articles.

The literature included the physiological parameters as influencing factors and useful indicators for HHC effects and identified site activity intensity as the most influencing work-related factor. In total, three main gaps were identified: (1) the role of substantial individual and work-related factors; (2) managerial interventions and the application of the right time against the right symptoms, sample size and measurement intervals and (3) applied methods of data collection; particularly, the intrusiveness of the utilised sensors.

The focus of researchers and practitioners should be in applying nonintrusive, innovative and real-time methods that can provide crew-level measurements. In particular, methods that can represent the actual effects of allocated tasks are aligned with real-time weather measurements, so proactive HHC-related preventions can be enforced on time.

This review contributes to the field of construction workers' safety in HHCs and enables researchers and practitioners to identify the most influential individual and work-related factors in HHCs. This review also proposes a framework for future research with suggestions to cover the highlighted research gaps and contributes to a critical research area in the construction industry.

Labor is the largest single cost contributor in agriculture. Accurate estimation of labor requirements is, thus, a key to cost reduction. Work measurement is the professional discipline for this type of estimations, in the industrial engineering domain. Horticulture, however, lays a substantial barrier to work and, thus, to work measurement. Till harvesting, its products – fruits/flowers, are in fixed positions, and for all tasks the workers have to arrive at the plant. The purpose of this paper is to develop, test and analyze a system to perform horticultural work study in agricultural environments in order to accurately estimate the required amount of labor for each activity and to improve productivity.

In this paper, the development of an advanced system for work study on a hand-held computer (HHC) platform for horticultural work measurement is presented and an experimental study was conducted. The methodology consists of characteristics of the system platform including hardware, interface and software, development of a dedicated measuring software, a controlled experiment in agricultural environment and a statistical analysis.

The study shows that a single surveyor who uses traditional tools is subject to measurement errors, which can be reduced only with the assistance of a second surveyor. The study further shows that the HHC platform enables to avoid this second surveyor – a single surveyor who uses the HHC platform performs as accurate as two surveyors who use traditional tools. Of course, being computers, the HHC platform maintains the advantage of error free data transfer, in practically negligible time.

This paper presents a unique approach to perform work study in agricultural environment and contributes to minimize the errors accumulated in the process and the manpower required to perform the measurements.