Development of a Mobile Application for Real-Time Reporting of Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) Incidents in a Factory Environment

Abstract

Incident reporting in manufacturing industries often relies on paper-based and manual procedures, causing delayed safety responses and incomplete documentation. This study aimed to develop and evaluate a cross-platform mobile application for real-time Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) incident reporting in the manufacturing sector to improve reporting quality, compliance, and response speed. A Research and Development approach using the Agile Scrum framework was combined with a quasi-experimental pre-test-post-test design for evaluation. The application was built using React Native, supported by Node.js, PostgreSQL, and Firebase. It was implemented and assessed over six months at PT. Semen Padang, involving 120 production workers, 15 OHS personnel, and 8 supervisors. Usability was measured using the System Usability Scale (SUS), while statistical analysis employed the Wilcoxon Signed-Rank test. Results showed that average reporting time decreased from 47 minutes to 8 minutes, an 83.0% reduction. The SUS score increased from 56.3 to 82.7 (p < 0.001). Reporting compliance rose by 46.4%. Minor accidents declined by 60.7%, moderate accidents by 55.6%, and near-miss reporting increased by 207.1%. These findings indicate that the application strengthened proactive safety culture by improving transparency, accelerating response time, and providing more complete incident data for risk-based decision-making. In conclusion, real-time mobile applications for OHS incident reporting effectively enhance reporting system performance and reduce workplace accidents, with strong potential as a model for digital transformation of OHS management in industrial settings and support sustainable organizational learning through faster hazard identification, communication, corrective action, and continuous safety performance improvement initiatives.