Mining safety systems company Expert Mining Solutions is rolling out a wearable fatigue-monitoring system at Anglo American’s thermal coal opencast mines, in South Africa, to assist in the monitoring of fatigue levels of equipment drivers.
Being implemented is Australian fatigue monitoring device company Smartcap’s Life wearable technology, which is a headband that uses electroencephalogram technology to monitor the wearer’s brain activity and detect levels of fatigue. The headband can be fitted into most types of hats, such as caps and hardhats, or it can be worn independently as a head strap.
Implementing the technology at the Anglo Thermal Coal mines should reduce the number of accidents resulting from tired drivers. The Life deal with the miner was concluded in December 2016 and is at an advanced stage of being implemented at the mines.
Life works by notifying the wearer once fatigue levels exceed a predetermined threshold; the data can also be reported to a central computing device such as a computer or cellphone.
Expert Mining Solutions South Africa CEO Ronald Venter says Life has been evaluated by four universities and certified to produce fatigue level reporting with an accuracy of 94.7%.
In order to assist in accelerating the roll-out of the technology, Expert Mining Solutions has compiled a series of videos in several of the South African official languages to help wearers understand how the technology works.
Although the implementation at Anglo Thermal Coal is the first official use of Life in the South African mining environment, the system has been in operation during a trial phase at one of diversified miner Assmang’s mines, in the Northern Cape, with more than two-million hours of data having been recorded over a five-year period.
Expert Mining Solutions aims to increase fatigue awareness in the mining environment through the development of a physical fatigue centre in South Africa to improve daily management of fatigue on mining sites.