From Laboratory Prototype to Sustainable Deployment: Smart Garment Technologies for Construction Safety Monitoring and a Multidimensional Readiness Framework

Abstract

Construction workers face disproportionate rates of fatal and nonfatal injuries, including falls, heat strain, overexertion, and struck-by incidents, that passive personal protective equipment cannot continuously monitor. Smart garments, which embed sensors and microelectronics directly into textile apparel, offer a deployable infrastructure for continuous worker-level physiological and kinematic monitoring. This PRISMA-guided systematic review synthesizes 76 records (search executed 31 December 2025; coverage 2000–2026), of which 63 are empirically validated and used for benchmarking. Four analytical contributions are made: (i) a tiered corpus classification separating construction-direct, transferable, and contextual evidence; (ii) stratification of all performance claims by validation context; (iii) explicit transferability assessment for records from healthcare, occupational safety, sports, and rehabilitation; and (iv) a deployment-maturity framework evaluating readiness across technical performance, validation maturity, operational durability, human and organizational acceptance, and system integration, extending beyond single-dimension scores such as NASA TRL. Only 7 of 63 empirical records (11%) were field or field-simulated, of which 6 reached TRL 5; most other systems remain at TRL 4. The framework suggests that technical performance is less often the primary limiting dimension than validation maturity, durability, and integration, although this conclusion is constrained by the dominance of laboratory and transferable evidence.