Assessing wearable technology adoption readiness in Sri Lanka’s manufacturing industry to enhance safety and health of maintenance workers

Abstract

There are growing challenges in the manufacturing sector in Sri Lanka when it comes to improving the safety and health of maintenance workers working under hazardous conditions. Wearable technology, which can be described as electronic equipment worn on the body and containing sensors to gather, process, and transmit real time physiological and environmental information, is a viable solution to enhancing occupational safety all over the world. Although this is possible, the adoption preparedness of manufacturing organizations in Sri Lanka to such technology has not yet been thoroughly studied, which is a significant gap in occupational safety and health studies among developing economies. The research intends to examine the level of wearable technology adoption preparedness among food and beverage manufacturing firms in Sri Lanka, paying special attention to improving the safety and health outcomes of the maintenance workers. Structured interviews were used to collect data based on strategic level decision makers and a systematic review of internal safety perfor-mance records of five purposively selected organizations. A multi criteria decision making methodology based on the Technique of Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) was used to rank the companies in terms of technological, operational, financial, and organizational preparedness factors. TOPSIS was chosen among other MCDM approaches due to its compensatory approach and ability to use both quantitative and qualitative criteria at the same time. Results indicate that there are notable differences: the greatest readiness score was observed in the dairy manufacturing company (MC1) (Ci = 1.0), and the lowest one was in the bottled water manufacturer (MC5) (Ci = 0.044). The most important determinant of readiness to adopt was found to be digital infrastructure maturity and organizational commitment. The research provides a replicable multidi-mensional preparedness measurement scale with practical implications to the industry stakeholders and policy-makers who desire to promote evidence based wearable technology use in the manufacturing industry in Sri Lanka.