Electronic safety equip-ment specialist Booyco Electronics started field trials to validate its pioneering biometric licensing system for underground machine operators at a local gold mine early this year, in response to significant interest for such a system.

Booyco Electronics MD Anton Lourens explains that a big issue in the mining industry of late has been maintaining proper control over underground machine operators and that the issuing of keys to operators has left the industry vulnerable to abuse, which has led to unnecessary safety-related incidents.

In response to this, Booyco Electronics has developed a unique biometric licensing system that uses fingerprints to authenticate licensed machine operators, which is suitable for harsh mining environments.

Booyco Electronics has intro-duced the system to its existing customers and also increased the countrywide deployment of its range of electronic safety equipment, which includes collision warning systems, environmental sensing instru-ments, a driver-state sensor and trapped-miner locator, as well as its range of Remcon industrial networking, tele-metry, monitoring and control solutions.

Lourens tells Mining Weekly that the company expects its newly developed biometric licensing system to result in a quantum leap forward for the control and licensing of under-ground machine operators.

He believes that the devel-opment of this technology, which is already attracting widespread interest in the local mining industry, is a South African first and, possibly, a world first in the way the biometric licensing technology is being applied.

Lourens says that the licen-sing system uses personalised smart cards, which are issued to identify individual licensed operators. This smart card stores the operator’s finger-prints and the details of the operator’s licensed capabilities, as well as the date on which the operator’s licence expires.

“The only way an operator can access and operate a given machine is if the scanning device on the machine authenti-cates the operator by validating the person’s fingerprint,” highlights Lourens.

This level of control can also be applied underground in other control environments, such as explosives magazines and access control to underground substations.

Lourens says the devel-opment of this system provides for the use of a Booyco Elec-tronics intrinsically safe power supply unit, which is housed in a flameproof enclosure, making it suitable for coal mining applications.

Communications to and from the biometric device will take place through an approved control module.

In terms of affordability, Lourens says the new biometric licensing system will prove to be highly cost effective in terms of the value it adds.

“At Booyco Electronics, our philosophy is to supply elec- tronic safety solutions that optimise mine safety,” he says, adding that the company adopts a focused approach to provide innovative mine-safety-related products, which will not only add value but also increase productivity in the Southern African mining sector.