The leading source of occupational fatalities is a portable ladder in Korea because it is widely used in industry as work platform. In order to reduce victims, it is necessary to establish preventive measures for the accidents caused by portable ladder. Therefore, this study statistically analyzed injury death by portable ladder for recent 10 years to investigate the accident characteristics. Next, to monitor wearing of safety helmet in real-time while working on a portable ladder, this study developed an object detection model based on the You Only Look Once(YOLO) architecture, which can accurately detect objects within a reasonable time. The model was trained on 6,023 images with/without ladders and safety helmets. The performance of the proposed detection model was 0.795 for F1 score and 0.843 for mean average precision. In addition, the proposed model processed at least 25 frames per second which make the model suitable for real-time application.