In mining, balancing productivity and safety has always been a challenge, but Hexagon Technologies is changing that by introducing new ways to monitor and protect workers, combining smart automation with care for people’s wellbeing.
Hexagon’s latest rollout, the Operator Alertness System (OAS) 7.5, doesn’t just warn — it acts as a digital sentinel, tracking operator vigilance and automatically linking it to collision-avoidance analytics. In doing so, it is reshaping how companies think about “safe mining.”
Most safety systems in mining have historically been reactive: alarms, emergency shutdowns, or vehicle-level collision sensors. Hexagon’s innovation veers sharply in the other direction: prevent incidents by understanding the human kernel at the wheel.
OAS 7.5 is designed to monitor operator fatigue, distraction or inattention — and correlate those states with real vehicle interactions, allowing safety teams to intervene before an event even unfolds.
During a field deployment spanning over 10,000 operating hours, Hexagon integrated OAS 7.5 with its Collision Avoidance System (CAS 10) in a real fleet environment. The result: predicted collision videos were captured and made available in just ~5.8 seconds for remote review — this in a mining environment notorious for network constraints.
“OAS 7.5 reaffirms Hexagon’s commitment to delivering industry-leading safety solutions that support customers in achieving their zero-harm goals,” said Dave Goddard, Executive Vice President of Hexagon’s Mining division.
Whitehaven Coal, which hosted the trial, described it as “a significant step forward in operational safety and data-driven learning.” They emphasized that the success hinged on “genuine collaboration, innovation, and a shared drive to make mining operations safer.”
Mining Safety
Hexagon frames this evolution not merely as another tool, but as a paradigm shift: mines are becoming “smart,” but humans remain central. As Hexagon puts it, its mining-division solutions “cut costs, boost efficiency, reduce risk and improve safety—driving sustainable, 24/7 operational excellence.”
The underlying logic is profound: safety isn’t just about machinery doing no harm — it’s about machinery understanding human states, anticipating lapses, and adjusting. By making operator state a first-class input into the broader safety architecture, Hexagon is effectively giving mines the ability to reason not just about metal, but about minds.
This move also reflects a growing recognition across high-risk industries that human factors — fatigue, distraction, information overload — are often the final common pathway to disaster. Embedding operator analytics into mining systems signals a shift in how risk is viewed: not purely mechanistic, but cognitive.
Challenges & Adoption
That said, deploying such systems at scale will require overcoming both technical and cultural hurdles. In network-challenged environments, ensuring latency stays within safe margins is nontrivial. Even the 5.8-second video capture in the trial is impressive, but margin for error remains tight in dynamic mining operations.
Moreover, mining organisations must confront the trust question: will operators accept continuous monitoring of their behavior? How will data privacy, false positives, and punitive perceptions be managed?
Hexagon has tried to preempt such issues by positioning OAS 7.5 as a collaborative tool, not a policing device. Dave Goddard described the system as helping “support customers in achieving their zero-harm goals”, rather than casting blame.
The Ripple Effect
The broader implications extend into autonomous mining. Hexagon has already partnered with Mineral Resources (MRL) to deploy automated road-train haulage — a long-haul, driverless system meant to reduce human exposure to fatigue risk.
By combining operator alertness systems with autonomous haulage, mines could dynamically shift tasks — giving more control to machines when human operators reach cognitive limits. In that sense, OAS may become an on-ramp to a more fluid human-machine partnership in mining.
What This Means for Mining in Emerging Regions
For mines in developing markets (Africa, South America, parts of Asia), safety challenges are magnified — aging fleets, infrastructural constraints, limited training resources. Systems like OAS 7.5 could offer a leapfrog opportunity: instead of retrofitting old protocols, mining firms could move into a new generation of safety practices.
Yet, cost, network bandwidth, and cultural acceptance remain barriers. Pilots and proof-points will be critical to adapting Hexagon’s systems to lower-bandwidth, lower-resource settings.