Occupational health and safety hazards in the extreme work environment of underground mines remained a serious concern for both mine management and regulatory agency. Miners are often employed to perform different mining activities across the mine and are always exposed to health risks such as lung cancer. With the technology advancements, it is now possible to keep track of mine individuals and their health parameters. The current practice of health analysis is periodic in nature and is highly dependent on voluntary participation. Wearable health sensing system is an alternative solution to overcome these challenges and is able to provide insights on miners' health conditions. Timely analysis of physiological parameters of the miners is immensely helpful to minimize the injuries and can also provide preventive measures for potential health hazards. In this paper, we propose a wireless health monitoring system, especially for underground mines. The contributions of this paper are twofold. First, it presents and discusses our proposed system architecture and solution followed by challenges of such system in the context of underground mines. Second, as a preliminary analysis, detailed discussion on the wireless link behavior for reliable data transmission and communication are presented. We performed real-world experimental measurements in an operational underground coal mine considering several deployment settings in straight, near face and curved mine galleries. The communication metrics (e.g., received signal strength and packet reception rate) are extensively evaluated.INDEX TERMS Health sensing, activity monitoring, underground mines, occupational health hazards, communication, data analytics, wearables in mines, artificial intelligence, miners.

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