Move over, iWatch. Illumiti, in collaboration with the SAP Co-Innovation Lab and Vandrico Solutions Inc., has launched the new MineSafe Smartwatch.
The MineSafe Smartwatch is a tool to help miners identify and respond to potentially dangerous issues. The watch enables real-time communication between miners underground and their support team on the surface.
Using real-time data and analysis software, mining companies can quickly identify and predict potential hazards, notify employees of dangerous situations, identify worker locations in an emergency, and provide safety guidance to workers in an automated fashion.
The MineSafe Smartwatch combines proactive features that can enhance worker awareness of safety issues with immediate response features that can assist both miners and topside responders in the event of an emergency.
“Our watch leverages Wi-Fi and sensors in the mine to provide mine workers with greater situational awareness, facilitate communications and accelerate evacuations,” said Lorraine Howell, vice president of R&D for Illumiti. “Using our worker tracking feature, the mining company can quickly identify the location of each miner in real time from the surface during an emergency, enabling safety teams to quickly locate missing team members. Localized evacuation messages can also be sent based on worker location in the mine.”
Some key features of the Smartwatch include:
- Worker location tracking. Tracks individual worker locations and enables regular check-ins.
- Real-time incident reporting. Enables miners to report any injuries or safety incidents in real time to operators at the surface who can take immediate action.
- Proactive real time communications. Automatically send safety procedures to workers step by step – and record whether or not procedures were followed.
- Automatic alerts. Using sensors set up within the mine, detects potentially hazardous conditions resulting from gas leaks, smoke or seismic movements and provides immediate alerts to workers in the danger zone through audible, visual and vibrating alarms.
Among the greatest benefits of MineSafe is the ability to facilitate distress calls. “Mine workers can use a one-touch distress call feature to send an urgent notice to the surface. The surface system is designed to send immediate alerts to key personnel and emergency responders based on the type of incident being reported – which can enhance response time and reduce risk to other workers,” said Gonzalo Tudela, CEO at Vandrico Solutions Inc.
The MineSafe Smartwatch leverages Vandrico’s Canary platform – a communications platform that creates a mine-specific “Internet of Things” across a Wi-Fi network using data from wearable devices and sensors placed throughout a mine. The Canary platform is built on the SAP HANA platform, hosted either on premise or in the cloud, which allows the MineSafe Smartwatch application to leverage real-time data analysis from a myriad of sources in order to identify emerging safety issues.
As issues are identified, key personnel can use the Control Centre function within the application to locate miners and transmit solutions, alerts and evacuation protocols to distinct users if necessary.
The MineSafe system will integrate with most mine-specific enterprise systems, including SCADA, MQTT and others. The solution can also be integrated with any existing mine sensors, or configured to suit the needs of a mining company.
For more information visit www.illumiti.com or www.vandrico.com.