Fatigue & Wellness Monitoring Platform

The Brief

Fatigue is one of mining’s most persistent safety risks — and the hardest to see coming. By the time a worker shows visible signs, the sleep debt has been accumulating for days. DankoSpark partnered with Polar to build a continuous fatigue and wellness monitoring platform purpose-built for mining and high-risk industrial environments: a system that gives operations a real-time, defensible view of workforce fatigue and recovery before fatigue leads to incidents.

The environment set hard constraints. Data had to flow reliably from Polar 360 wearables worn by workers who may never touch a computer; connectivity on mine sites is unreliable; and insights had to reach a multilingual workforce in language they actually use.

What we built

The platform ingests sleep, activity and recovery data through two channels: an on-site collection process engineered for the realities of mining connectivity, and Polar’s AccessLink cloud API for workers linked via their own devices, with secure webhook-driven updates. Supervisors get dashboards, configurable exception rules and server-side reporting across the workforce; individual workers receive SMS communications and a personal wellness report.

That report is the platform’s signature feature: an AI-narrated wellness infographic that turns a week of raw physiological data into plain-language insight and practical recommendations specific to that worker’s actual week — generated on demand and delivered as a link by SMS. The entire communication layer is localised into seven languages, including Afrikaans, isiXhosa, isiZulu, Setswana, Sesotho and Fanakalo — the lingua franca of South African mines.

The system is built on a .NET clean architecture backend with an Angular front end and SQL Server, engineered for auditability: every reading is device-stamped, every intervention traceable.

Outcome

Mines using the platform get what pen-and-paper fitness-for-duty checks can’t provide: continuous, objective, worker-friendly fatigue visibility across the workforce, with early-warning rules that surface risk before it reaches the face. Read more about the thinking behind the platform in our article on monitoring fatigue and wellness in mining.