# Integrating the IoT and Blockchain Technology for the Next Generation of Mining Inspection Systems  
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Footnote 1: [[https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sensors](https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sensors)]([https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sensors](https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sensors))  
Footnote 2: [[https://www.mdpi.com/journals/pdf/10.3390/10](https://www.mdpi.com/journals/pdf/10.3390/10)]([https://www.mdpi.com/journals/pdf/10.3390/10](https://www.mdpi.com/journals/pdf/10.3390/10)). Following the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) guidelines and recommendations to properly maintain equipment. OEM's manuals and operators' experience typically support this process and aim to keep the assets in working conditions, reducing maintenance costs. * Following the outcomes of inspections carried out by a designated inspection officer appointed by a local, national, or supranational body. Public agencies mainly support these inspections with a duty to guarantee certain levels of safety of mining sites [2] and efficiency of machines (e.g., exhaust gases, tire pressures, minimum tire thread height). Therefore, the inspection of mining assets is a process that involves several stakeholders, including the OEM, the owner, the user, inspectors, and various services companies [3]. In mining, and regardless of the followed approach, inspections are usually carried out using legacy and poorly digitized procedures. First, an inspector receives the information about the asset, printing the checklist of inspection points to collect. Then, she goes to the mining site to inspect the asset, noting down all the critical inspection points. Next, the inspector uses certified measurement tools (e.g., calipers, noise dosimeters, depth gauges) or writes observations that cannot be measured (e.g., missing instructions book, broken taillights). Once the inspection is complete, the collected measures and observations are manually inserted into an IT system, responsible for storing the detailed inspection data, computing the inspection's outcome, and continuing the maintenance process. In this context, many research opportunities arise from the adoption of digital technologies to make inspection procedures more automated, reliable, and simple. First, the ubiquitous presence of modern mobile devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets) provides a low-cost tool to carry out inspections, store measures and observations, and then automatically transfer them to an IT system to obtain the inspection result. This approach can work even in remote mining sites with no Internet connection because mobile devices have enough memory to collect several inspections and transfer them once an Internet connection is available. Using these technologies could greatly simplify the process, reducing the overhead of writing the information several times. Second, modern mobile devices offer various short-range communication technologies (e.g., Bluetooth, WiFi, NFC) to interact with the new measurement tools (e.g., calipers and depth gauges). This approach can also work with older tools as cost-effective IoT devices could be used for retrofitting these tools [4; 5]. Using these technologies could greatly improve the precision of the measurements and reduce the errors due to human intervention. Third, blockchain technologies provide a trusted repository of information, where data are secure and traceable, and the data source can be precisely identified [6]. Using blockchain technology could further improve trust and transparency between the stakeholders involved in the maintenance process [3]. Despite this interest, there has been little discussion on integrating these technologies into the mining domain. This paper presents and evaluates an end-to-end system to conduct inspections using mobile devices that directly interact with connected measurement tools.