On the Opportunities for Using Mobile Devices for Activity Monitoring and Understanding in Mining Applications

Over the last decades, number of embedded and portable computer systems for monitoring of activities of miners and underground environmental conditions that have been developed has increased. However, their potential in terms of computing power and analytic capabilities is still underestimated. In this paper we elaborate on the recent examples of the use of wearable devices in mining industry. We identify challenges for high level monitoring of mining personnel with the use of mobile and wearable devices. To address some of them, we propose solutions based on our recent works, including context-aware data acquisition framework, physiological data acquisition from wearables, methods for incomplete and imprecise data handling, intelligent data processing and reasoning module, hybrid localization using semantic maps, and adaptive power management. We provide a basic use case to demonstrate the usefulness of this approach.