While wearables are quickly making inroads in the consumer market, many expect that they will find equal or greater success in the enterprise market. One way they could achieve this by helping many jobs become not only easier but also safer. The just announced MineSafe Smartwatch is an example of such a device. Designed for the mining industry by Canada’s Vandrico with partners SAP Co-Innovation Lab and Illumiti, it will help miners identify and respond to potentially dangerous issues.
“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.”
Features of the MineSafe 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.
The MineSafe Smartwatch leverages Vandrico’s Canary platform. This communications platform creates a mine-specific ‘Internet of Things’ across a Wi-Fi network using data from wearable devices and sensors placed throughout a mine.
Source : Vandrico