Mining Goes Digital – Mueller et al. (Eds)
© 2019 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 978-0-367-33604-2
437
Industrial internet of things and gamification applied to fleet and
personnel management
Sean Dessureault
MST Global, Tucson, USA
ABSTRACT: The ubiquity of big data, Internet of Things (IoT), and smart devices is radically changing society, our personal lives are being tracked, digitally motivated through gamification, where digital interactions have become an addiction at all income levels, genders,
and generations. These forces should not be held at bay in mining, rather we should embrace
and take advantage of this phenomenon to improve safety and productivity. Real case studies
of these applications of both technology and approach, such as gamification, show that these
tracking technologies can bring high visibility and large amounts of data to even the smallest
operations and the challenge of making use of the data can be facilitated through the application of gamification. As with our personal smart devices, these technologies are poised to
deliver huge improvements in operator feedback, tracking, and performance management,
at a much lower cost per unit.
1 INTRODUCTION
Technology has changed every facet of contemporary life in the industrialized world. The
universality of mobile phones along with their accompanying mobile apps and social media
platforms are rapidly changing and democratizing the developing world. Society has been
forced to abandon traditional forms of media, interpersonal interactions, and means of consuming data. Despite the many conferences speeches, journal articles, and research endeavors
that extoll the benefits of new technology, supervising and motivating personnel, and data
utilization has remained relatively unchanged, specifically ever more data is being generated
although its utilization rate remains low. However, contemporary life has seen far more transformation than witnessed or experienced in mining.
The forces at work, making our smart devices engaging to the point of addiction, need not
be isolated to consumers, rather, an exploration of the key elements of modern technology
and demonstrated improvements to modern life can have industrial parallels. The rise of the
creativity of crowd or user developed content, the lowering of the cost of monitoring the real
activities through the Internet of Things, manipulating human behavior through gamification, and the low-cost of powerful mobile computers. These can all be leveraged in the industrial space to create safer, lower cost mines along with a more engaged workforce.
Industrial Internet of Things (IoT), such as low-cost sensors or imbedded sensing within
smart devices such as tablets can provide greatly expanded data collection abilities with lowcost devices with industrial-strength cases. Inertial sensing for detecting movement in the
absence of GPS or for vibration monitoring is automatically imbedded in all smart devices,
typically for screen orientation and driving games. Bluetooth Low Energy sensors, invented
for improved tracking in a retail space, can be repurposed for underground or indoor tracking as well as proximity sensing. Finally, all this sensing can be made ever more useful by
creating a highly engaging means of automated work supervision and motivation.
The examples of gamification, inertial sensing, and BLE monitoring were collected with
a commercial off-the-shelf system comprising of an iPad, an iPad ‘app’, and a back-end
© 2019 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 978-0-367-33604-2
437
Industrial internet of things and gamification applied to fleet and
personnel management
Sean Dessureault
MST Global, Tucson, USA
ABSTRACT: The ubiquity of big data, Internet of Things (IoT), and smart devices is radically changing society, our personal lives are being tracked, digitally motivated through gamification, where digital interactions have become an addiction at all income levels, genders,
and generations. These forces should not be held at bay in mining, rather we should embrace
and take advantage of this phenomenon to improve safety and productivity. Real case studies
of these applications of both technology and approach, such as gamification, show that these
tracking technologies can bring high visibility and large amounts of data to even the smallest
operations and the challenge of making use of the data can be facilitated through the application of gamification. As with our personal smart devices, these technologies are poised to
deliver huge improvements in operator feedback, tracking, and performance management,
at a much lower cost per unit.
1 INTRODUCTION
Technology has changed every facet of contemporary life in the industrialized world. The
universality of mobile phones along with their accompanying mobile apps and social media
platforms are rapidly changing and democratizing the developing world. Society has been
forced to abandon traditional forms of media, interpersonal interactions, and means of consuming data. Despite the many conferences speeches, journal articles, and research endeavors
that extoll the benefits of new technology, supervising and motivating personnel, and data
utilization has remained relatively unchanged, specifically ever more data is being generated
although its utilization rate remains low. However, contemporary life has seen far more transformation than witnessed or experienced in mining.
The forces at work, making our smart devices engaging to the point of addiction, need not
be isolated to consumers, rather, an exploration of the key elements of modern technology
and demonstrated improvements to modern life can have industrial parallels. The rise of the
creativity of crowd or user developed content, the lowering of the cost of monitoring the real
activities through the Internet of Things, manipulating human behavior through gamification, and the low-cost of powerful mobile computers. These can all be leveraged in the industrial space to create safer, lower cost mines along with a more engaged workforce.
Industrial Internet of Things (IoT), such as low-cost sensors or imbedded sensing within
smart devices such as tablets can provide greatly expanded data collection abilities with lowcost devices with industrial-strength cases. Inertial sensing for detecting movement in the
absence of GPS or for vibration monitoring is automatically imbedded in all smart devices,
typically for screen orientation and driving games. Bluetooth Low Energy sensors, invented
for improved tracking in a retail space, can be repurposed for underground or indoor tracking as well as proximity sensing. Finally, all this sensing can be made ever more useful by
creating a highly engaging means of automated work supervision and motivation.
The examples of gamification, inertial sensing, and BLE monitoring were collected with
a commercial off-the-shelf system comprising of an iPad, an iPad ‘app’, and a back-end