Abstract
Mine disasters claim thousands of human lives and cause millions of property loss every year. The safety of the mine worker is of paramount importance in any underground environment. Advances in the development of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) for monitoring infrastructure health, and environmental conditions provide end users with the benefit of low-cost installation, maintenance and scalability. This paper will investigate the challenges around a development of a real-time mine monitoring system using wireless sensor nodes to prevent mine disasters such as gas explosions or mine collapses. We propose a mobile, real-time gateway that will be able to process data collected from static wireless sensor nodes monitoring underground infrastructure, to prevent underground disasters.