As mining operations are increasing in number around the world, the need for more accuracy to extract minerals at a higher recuperation rate and the safety of workers worldwide is crucial. Mobile apps can collect and display critical information for geological models’ updates, safety issues, notes, and labels left by personnel for safety issues, and can even automatically update information from the mining server.
Here are three reasons why mobile apps are important in mining and geology:
- Independence: A lot of mine operations depend on experienced users for decisions in planning and design, especially in difficult situations like when we need to estimate dilution results. When these experienced employees leave, the operation hits many obstacles in decision-making, because of the absence of experience. Mobile apps come in and solve that problem using artificial intelligence. By training an artificial intelligence through a feedback loop that could capture information and predict results, you become completely independent and take excellent decisions, based on real live data.
- Safety: The use of location tracking in smartphones opens doors to many opportunities to ensure the safety of personnel. When there is a major safety issue in a mine, we can’t wait to be notified in the office or off-site. Alerting all mine personnel is critical to decreasing injuries and accidents. Mobile apps can solve that problem through an app where you can take notes, insert labels in specific locations, and immediately notify all personnel of faults, rock bursts, or other safety issues.
- Efficiency: Updating geological models and survey information requires us to leave the site, go to an office, insert a USB drive into a machine, download data and upload them to a server or modeling software. As this is extremely time-consuming, mobile apps can automatically update that information in the cloud or to a local server, saving you an enormous amount of time.
Almost everyone in the world nowadays, without a doubt, owns a smartphone, giving us a huge opportunity to use it to our advantage to improve our mining processes, increase our safety, and grab critical information to be shared with the rest of the organization. Not only does data collection and sharing of information are useful applications but using mobile apps in mining and geology will help us make faster and better business decisions.
