By Neville Judd
Mining operations generate enormous amounts of safety data every day. From fatigue monitoring systems to collision avoidance alerts and operational analytics, mines have more visibility into risk than ever before.
Yet despite advances in monitoring technology, many operations still struggle to answer a critical question: why are safety events happening in the first place?
For Hexagon’s Adrian Heieis, Senior Product Manager, that challenge is personal. After starting his mining career as a haul truck operator, he experienced firsthand the realities of fatigue, operational pressure, and the split-second risks operators face every shift.
Today, he is focused on helping mining companies move beyond isolated data points and toward something far more valuable: operational context.
Meet Adrian Heieis: Adrian speaks candidly about the fatigue and distraction risks he faced as a haul truck operator.
Understanding what mining safety feels like
Heieis began his mining career in 2014 as a summer student driving haul trucks near Waco, Texas. For a young Canadian entering the mining industry for the first time, the experience was eye-opening.
The lessons extended well beyond equipment operation or production targets. Working long shifts in demanding conditions provided a direct understanding of what safety risks feel like inside the cab, particularly fatigue.
Like many operators, Heieis remembers the pressure to perform, stay alert, and prove himself while managing exhaustion during long shifts. Those experiences stayed with him throughout his career and ultimately shaped his approach to mining safety technology.
Adrain Heieis operating a haul truck in 2014.
Moving from operations to mining technology
Following operational roles across North America, Heieis realised he wanted to create broader industry impact beyond a single site. That ambition led him into mining technology and digital transformation, including roles supporting autonomous haulage systems and advanced analytics initiatives.
At Teck Resources, he joined the company’s RACE21 digital transformation programme, focusing on health and safety analytics. Two risks consistently emerged as critical priorities:
- Exposure to respirable dust
- Heavy vehicle and light vehicle interactions
These remain among the mining industry’s most significant operational safety challenges today.
Why safety analytics worked for dust exposure
One area where analytics delivered strong results was respirable dust monitoring.
By developing analytical tools that provided occupational hygiene teams with real-time exposure data and operational context, teams could identify trends, test interventions, and measure whether safety improvements were working.
The key difference was not simply the availability of data. It was the ability to understand the surrounding operational conditions and apply a continuous improvement approach.
Teams could effectively:
- Identify potential risks
- Implement targeted interventions
- Measure outcomes
- Adjust processes based on results
This enabled a practical “plan, do, check, act” cycle that supported measurable safety improvements.
The challenge with vehicle interaction data
Applying the same approach to vehicle interactions proved far more difficult. Teams built sophisticated analytics platforms using data from:
- Collision avoidance systems
- Operator alertness systems
- In-vehicle monitoring systems
- Radio communications
The data clearly identified where high-risk interactions were occurring. Heatmaps, alerts, and trends highlighted operational hotspots and recurring patterns.
But there was still a critical gap. The systems could show what happened, but not why it happened. Without understanding the operational context surrounding an event, teams struggled to identify root causes or implement meaningful preventative actions.
“Reporting tells you what your risk is,” says Heieis. “Context tells you how to reduce it.”
At Tarrawonga Mine, Whitehaven Coal strengthened safety by integrating Hexagon Operator Alertness System (OAS) with Hexagon Collision Avoidance System (CAS). OAS now automatically captures video footage of CAS events.
Bringing context into mining safety systems
When Heieis joined Hexagon in 2024, he saw an opportunity to address this missing link directly.
Today, he manages Hexagon Operator Alertness System (OAS), technology designed to help reduce fatigue-related risks and improve operator safety during long shifts.
More importantly, he recognised the role contextual video data could play in helping operations better understand safety events. Unlike isolated alerts or analytics dashboards, video provides operational context. It allows teams to see:
- What operators were experiencing
- Environmental conditions at the time of the event
- Potential distractions or visibility issues
- How interactions between vehicles developed
- The sequence of events leading up to a risk incident
This insight became the foundation for integrating Hexagon Operator Alertness System (OAS) with Hexagon Collision Avoidance System (CAS).
OAS-CAS integration automatically captures video footage linked to collision avoidance events.
Turning safety data into operational action
The integration between OAS and CAS allows operations to automatically capture video footage linked to collision avoidance events. Instead of reviewing abstract data points or heatmaps, safety teams can now analyse real-world operational scenarios with significantly greater clarity.
This changes how operations approach risk reduction. Rather than reacting only when a serious event occurs, teams can proactively identify behavioural patterns, environmental conditions, or operational processes contributing to elevated risk.
The result is a more effective and informed approach to continuous safety improvement.
At operations such as Whitehaven Coal’s Tarrawonga Mine, integrating OAS and CAS has strengthened visibility into vehicle interactions and helped teams better understand operational risk factors.
Improving mining safety through operational understanding
For Heieis, one of the most encouraging outcomes has been the speed at which operations can now act on insights.
Where previous analytics initiatives sometimes struggled to generate actionable outcomes, mines using integrated contextual safety systems are now identifying operational improvements within weeks.
The shift highlights an important lesson for the mining industry: more data alone does not automatically improve safety outcomes. The ability to interpret events within operational context is what enables meaningful action.
As mining companies continue investing in digital transformation and connected operations, contextual intelligence will play an increasingly important role in helping teams reduce risk, strengthen decision-making, and improve operational safety performance.
The future of connected mining safety
Mining safety technology is evolving from reactive monitoring toward connected, intelligence-driven risk management.
By integrating systems such as operator alertness monitoring and collision avoidance with contextual video analysis, mining companies can move beyond simply detecting hazards to understanding and preventing them more effectively.
For operations facing increasing production pressures and growing safety expectations, that capability is becoming essential. Ultimately, improving mining safety depends not only on seeing risks, but on understanding them clearly enough to drive operational change.
To read Adrian Heieis’ first-person perspective on contextual mining safety and connected operational intelligence, subscribe to Shift for exclusive thought leadership from across Hexagon and its customer community.