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The undergrounding mining environment is inherently dangerous due to its numerous uncertainties, like unpredictable geological conditions or severe visibility limitations. Accidental missing or lost way in these dark spaces would pose threats to life safety of workers. To mitigate these potential risks, an increasing number of modern mining businesses begin to introduce smart IoT solutions to establish reliable lifelines for underground personnel.
Challenge
A gold mine in South Africa faced a challenge in monitoring their mine workers. Its scale is large, with five mines and thousands of workers. Traditionally, there was no efficient method to monitor the accurate location of every miner. Especially when there was a mining accident, dark environments and complex layout with multiple corridors and tunnels would make the undergrounding searching a complicated and tough task. Without a useful way, rescue team cannot locate trapped miners in a quick manner, but need to waste much time on searching. Therefore, these suffering miners would have less possibilities to be rescued. To better protect their life, an effective solution was urgently needed.
Solution
To solve the problem, the mine managers have adopted a reliable IoT solution. Instead of equipping miners with heavy and external tracking devices, small-sized Bluetooth beacons have been utilized. A compact coin tag has been inserted within the standard headlamp of every employee, ensuring seamless monitoring and uninterrupted operation. Strategically deployed a robust network of industrial Bluetooth gateways at critical junctions, allowing them to continuously detect BLE data packages emitted from tags. After transmitting such data to online cloud application via Ethernet, managers could get accurate location or even movement history of every mining worker at any time. During emergencies, the solution could instantly locate trapped workers, drastically accelerating response and measures.
One advantage of this solution is cost-effectiveness. By adopting affordable BLE-based tags, the mine achieves a great balance between personnel safety enhancement and strict budget constraints. These low-cost BLE tags, featuring with replaceable battery and low energy consumption, could establish a scalable solution without compromising on reliability. Another point is minimal modifications of existed wiring infrastructure. Differ from traditional tracking systems, the total solution only needs to arrange extra wires to each gateway instead of considering much wiring deployments. Such method simplifies deployment and eliminates the need for further maintenance to the maximum.
Featured Products
M1 is a coin tag is a compact Bluetooth beacon. Besides asset tracking, its lightweight and cost-effective feature enable it to become an ideal choice for personnel monitoring. Easily attached on employee card, it offers location-based positioning with high-level accuracy. Suitable for various scenarios including warehousing, hospitals and more.
MKGW3 is a budget-friendly BLE to PoE gateway. Acting as a data bridge between BLE beacons and cloud server, MKGW3 offers both wireless and wired connectivity options (supports BLE 5.0, 2.4GHz Wi-Fi, and Ethernet). Ideal for asset tracking and personnel safety monitoring in most indoor environments.
