Occupational health and safety hazards in the extreme work environment of underground mines remained a serious concern for both mine management and regulatory agency. Miners are often employed to perform different mining activities across the mine and are always exposed to health risks such as lung cancer. With the technology advancements, it is now possible to keep track of mine individuals and their health parameters. The current practice of health analysis is periodic in nature and is highly dependent on voluntary participation. Wearable health sensing system is an alternative solution to overcome these challenges and is able to provide insights on miners' health conditions. Timely analysis of physiological parameters of the miners is immensely helpful to minimize the injuries and can also provide preventive measures for potential health hazards. In this paper, we propose a wireless health monitoring system, especially for underground mines. The contributions of this paper are twofold. First, it presents and discusses our proposed system architecture and solution followed by challenges of such system in the context of underground mines. Second, as a preliminary analysis, detailed discussion on the wireless link behavior for reliable data transmission and communication are presented. We performed real-world experimental measurements in an operational underground coal mine considering several deployment settings in straight, near face and curved mine galleries. The communication metrics (e.g., received signal strength and packet reception rate) are extensively evaluated.INDEX TERMS Health sensing, activity monitoring, underground mines, occupational health hazards, communication, data analytics, wearables in mines, artificial intelligence, miners.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

The groundwater near mines is contaminated heavily as regards acidity, alkalinity, toxicity, heavy mineral, and microbes. During rainy season, the mines are filled with the water which contaminates the groundwater and gradually disperses by percolating through the soil into urban area, making the water unsuitable for use. In addition, fertilizers used for agricultural purpose affect pH and nitrate content of groundwater. Hence, evaluation of WQI of groundwater is extremely important in urban areas close to mines to prepare for make remedial measures. To this end, the present study proposes an efficient methodology such as adaptive network fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) for the prediction of water quality. The parameters used to assess water quality are usually correlated and this makes an assessment unreasonable. Therefore, the parameters are uncorrelated using principal component analysis with varimax rotation. The uncorrelated parameters values are fuzzified to take into account uncertainty and impreciseness during data collection and experimentation. An efficient rule base and optimal distribution of membership function is constructed from the hybrid learning algorithm of ANFIS. The model performed quite satisfactorily with the actual and predicted water quality. The model can also be used for estimating water quality on-line, but the accuracy of the model depends upon the proper training and selection of parameters.

In order to meet the ever-increasing demands of the modern society, the mineral production in our country is continuously increasing along with the scale of mining operations. However, mineral production is often not in consonance with conservation of environment and forests, since many mineral deposits including iron, manganese, chromite, bauxite and coal etc. exist below thick forests. Mining has several adverse impacts including air, water and soil pollution, socio-economic problems and effect on wildlife population and their behaviour. There has been greater stress on surface mining for boosting the production in our country, which has a larger environmental footprint compared to underground mining. As the deposits near the surface are exhausted underground mining may become cost competitive. Moreover, the technological developments in the field of underground mining, viz. mass production equipments, roof support, communication and automation is helping the decision makers to consider underground mining practice for sustainable mining while meeting environmental concerns.