# Integrating the IoT and Blockchain Technology for the Next Generation of Mining Inspection Systems
## 6 Conclusions and Future Works  
This paper presented and evaluated an end-to-end system to conduct mining inspections. The proposed system architecture uses off-the-shelf mobile devices and integrates IoT and blockchain technologies. Furthermore, our proposal provides a method to create smart measuring tools using low-cost embedded CPUs that directly interact with a blockchain system, guarantee data integrity, and increase trustworthiness. We highlighted the benefits of the proposed architecture by describing and evaluating the implementation of a pilot in a real mining inspection scenario. Such a pilot represents one of the outcomes of an ongoing research and innovation project funded by the EU Commission and involving research institutions, universities, and relevant companies in the mining sector. Our results showed that a very cost-effective IoT board (USD 10) could provide a suitable platform (in terms of disk usage and memory) to create new types of connected tools that directly benefit from blockchain technology. Furthermore, in terms of additional processing time, the operations performed on the blockchain averaged 24 s on a public blockchain network. Finally, concerning energy requirements, the connectivity of the tool (i.e., BLE) increased the average power requirement by almost 38%, while enabling blockchain had very little influence. Nonetheless, in the context of a full mining inspection and using a small 500 mAh battery, the connected device consumed only 20% of the total available energy. These findings suggest an important role for portable mobile devices, connected measuring tools, and a blockchain infrastructure in promoting the adoption of digital technologies to make inspection procedures more automated, reliable, and simple.  
Future works include evaluating other communications methods between the connected tool and the mobile app (i.e., NFC, WiFi). Another interesting research direction is evaluating low-power modes and other IoT hardware platforms to reduce the power consumption of the connected tool. Finally, another interesting aspect to further develop the system is the integration of more complex evaluation algorithms (i.e., AI-based) that can run outside the blockchain. These algorithms could benefit from the information collected both on the cloud module and the blockchain module and should maintain the same level of trustworthiness.  
All authors contributed equally to the conceptualization, methodology, validation, investigation, original draft preparation, review and editing of this paper. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c} \hline \hline  & **Min. (mA)** & **Max. (mA)** & **Avg. (mA)** & **Energy (mWh)** \\ \hline (1) & Baseline & 40.2 & 41.6 & 40.5 & 134.4 \\ (2) & BLE & 42.2 & 154.1 & 55.7 & 181.2 \\ (3) & Blockchain & 42.3 & 154.2 & 55.8 & 182.4 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 6: Power requirements and energy consumption (at 3.3 V) in 30 s windows for three cases.  
**Funding:** This research was co-funded by the European Union through the EIT Raw Materials' KAVA Call 6: SAFEMe4 MINE upscaling project (project number 19036).  
**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.  
**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.  
**Data Availability Statement:** Not applicable.  
**Acknowledgments:** We would like to thank [PERSON] for his valuable contribution during the preliminary software development phase.  
**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.