The European construction industry faces three major challenges: improve its productivity, increase the safety and well-being of its workforce and make a shift towards a green, resource-efficient industry.

In the wake of these needs, the European Builders Confederation (EBC) decided to join 21 other organisations led by the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence’s (DFKI) Augmented Vision department in the new ambitious project HumanTech, falling under the Horizon Europe research and innovation programme.

HumanTech, aims at developing Human Centered Technologies for a safer and greener European Construction Industry and will run for a period of 36 months with a consortium made up of leading research institutes and universities, innovative hi-tech SMEs and large enterprises, construction groups and construction SME representatives from 10 countries contributing with 11 different expertise.

EBC is eager to contribute to HumanTech’s objective of following the trail of the twin transitions towards a greener and more digitalized construction sector, proposing a human-centred approach, involving breakthrough technologies such as wearables for worker safety and support, and intelligent robotic technology that can harmoniously co-exist with human workers while also contributing to the green transition of the industry.

Against this background, it must be borne in mind that these new technologies must then be easily accessible and usable by SMEs, as they are the backbone of the European construction sector representing 99.9% of the market.

“The European Builders Confederation (EBC) will be involved in the usability assessment of the impact of the identified technologies on construction SMEs, in promoting the awareness of such solutions and in developing a new approach to training for the upskilling of the current and future workforce.”

For the sake of that, EBC will be involved in the usability assessment of the impact of the identified technologies on construction SMEs, in promoting the awareness of such solutions and in developing a new approach to training for the upskilling of the current and future workforce.

What is more, thanks to its position, EBC will play a key role in the EU-wide dissemination of the main projects’ findings in the European Construction community and in building partnerships and synergies with other relevant initiatives and projects.


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