The construction industry in the US accounts for a high number of occupational injuries and fatalities every year. According to the OSHA requirements, every construction employer should employ a safety program that involves both training of the employees and frequent site inspections. Site inspections are traditionally performed utilizing paper based systems that are usually designed to address a specific work area or procedure. Inspection reports generally do not include any detailed visual information regarding the site. This paper presents an effort to complement the traditional paper based safety inspection process with an affordable electronic based inspection process to increase accuracy in identifying hazards, ease communication, and record maintenance.

To accomplish this objective, a Tablet PC application was developed that concentrates on the four prime hazard areas; electrical, falls, struck by, and trenching and excavation. The Tablet PC application makes it possible to capture the image of the worksite while marking the problem areas on the image. After each site inspection, an HTML report is generated which includes the worksite image with marked problem areas together with possible solutions for each problem area. The results of a performance evaluation for the application are also included as a part of this paper using three sample work sites.