Intelligent underground device safeguards occupational health and mine production

Being the world's largest coal producer and consumer, China puts significant emphasis on coal energy in its national resource development strategy. But the coal industry is facing great challenges, including complex geological conditions, harsh environments, and security risks.

Improving mining and production safety has therefore become an urgent need and important development direction for smart mining construction.

Long labor-intensive work in underground environments leads to many health risks, including chronic and sudden-onset diseases. Traditional equipment for miners is often heavy and difficult to carry. With simple functions designed for limited scenarios, such devices are not built to dynamically monitor and manage the health and safety of coal mine workers. The occupational health management situation is dire.

To protect the health and safety of workers, Beidou Tiandi and Huawei jointly created an occupational health management solution designed to protect mine workers. Based on sensing, positioning, and next-generation communication technologies, the solution improves a coal mine's monitoring abilities, emergency handling management, and auxiliary command and dispatch for emergency rescue. The solution promotes the steady improvement of coal mine safety, quality, and efficiency.

The intelligent device solution is also equipped with a smart coal mine equipment platform, which enables smartphones to quickly connect to underground operation devices and implement efficient management. By adopting MineHarmony OneHop and near field communication (NFC), the solution helps workers read onsite operation device parameters, maintain and upgrade devices, and improve work efficiency. Wearable watches customized for mining can monitor the heart rate, blood oxygen, blood pressure, body temperature, and other physical data of underground workers in real time, and upload it to a health management platform through Bluetooth or Wi-Fi.

Intrinsically safe wearable watches are explosion-proof watches that limit the electric sparks or energy of the thermal effect generated inside electrical devices and by connected conducting wires, preventing the watches from igniting. If an emergency occurs, workers can use the watches to send SOS alarms to the platform. At the same time, the ground display system displays an alarm window, and ground personnel can quickly respond to the alarms based on the location provided by the precise positioning module of the mine lamp.

Currently, the worker health management platform and intelligent devices have been successfully launched in multiple coal mines and energy companies. Take the Zhuanlongwan Coal Mine of Shandong Energy Group as an example, the worker health management platform was deployed and launched in March 2022. The entire platform system is designed based on environmental safety and worker health. It adopted technologies such as big data collection on smart devices, comprehensive multi-dimensional data analysis, and smart health detection to provide full-lifecycle health services for workers. Currently, the Zhuanlongwan Coal Mine is equipped with over 1,000 intrinsically safe watches, which have been updated to version 2.0.

On the worker health management platform of the Jinjitan Coal Mine, more than 300 intrinsically safe watches and MineHarmony-based mine lamps have been put into operation. The Beidou Health AI mirrors were put into use on June 15, 2022. With these tools, vital signs such as heart rate, blood oxygen, step count, and body temperature of all mine workers during their operations are evaluated and clearly displayed since the facial dynamic blood data were captured by the mirror camera.

In September 2023, the worker health management platform of Dongtan Coal Mine officially went live, establishing electronic worker health records for more than 2,500 workers in 25 underground positions and key ground positions of the mine. The Dongtan Coal Mine installed more than 2,600 smart watches and 30 multi-parameter portable instruments, as well as worker health appliances in wellhead healthcare stations. So far, the platform has collected more than 14,850,000 data records. By analyzing the collected data, the platform has established a risk assessment model and filtered out eight workers who required special attention. The system effectively ensures normal mine production operations.

On October 25, 2023, the mobile phone reconstructed based on Huawei Mate 60 series for the mining business went live. The mobile phone supports two-way satellite communication, NearLink technology, and multi-device collaboration. At the same time, the industry's first mine bone- conduction headset and MineHarmony multi-parameter detection alarm instruments were released. The bone-conduction headset adopts Huawei's industrial noise reduction algorithm and bidirectional bone-conduction technology, which can meet the requirements of clear communications in strong noise environments such as mining, washing, and transportation without blocking workers' ears.

With the digital and intelligent development of occupational health, the safety evaluation and warning of the coal mine operation environment are interconnected with intelligent individual equipment in real time, effectively protecting the health and safety of workers and greatly improving the operational efficiency of enterprises.