An Investigation Into The Factors That Govern Success For New Safety And Health Technologies In The Mining Industry And The Efficacy Of Those Factors To Predict The Likelihood Of Success For Emerging Technologies

Download or read book An Investigation Into the Factors that Govern Success for New Safety and Health Technologies in the Mining Industry and the Efficacy of Those Factors to Predict the Likelihood of Success for Emerging Technologies written by Jacob Lawrence Carr and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The mining industry faces many safety and health challenges, and these challenges are often addressed by the introduction of new technologies, many of which are introduced through legislative or regulatory mandates requiring the technologys use. Many such mandates have been enacted, causing dramatic changes to how work is conducted. Despite these mandates, there are cases in which the intended safety or health benefit of introducing a new technology was not achieved, or worse, cases in which some unintended negative consequence was created by the introduction of a new technology. Given the weighty consequences these mandates can have, both in terms of economic impacts as well as impacts on the safety and health of miners, it is increasingly critical to ensure that the technologies being mandated will achieve their intended benefit without introducing unintended negative consequences. To that end, the goal of the research presented in this dissertation was to identify the factors that govern the success of new safety and health technologies in the mining industry and to develop guidance for the timely and effective introduction of new safety and health technologies through legislative or regulatory mandates. This goal was accomplished through an analysis of several case studies of mining safety and health technology introduction, including mandated as well as voluntarily adopted interventions. For each case study, the development and diffusion of the technology was examined and indications that the technology achieved either a successful or an unsuccessful outcome was identified. Causal tree analysis was then used to identify the root causes for each of these successful and unsuccessful outcomes. The root causes identified for unsuccessful outcomes include, among other factors, the effect of biases on decisions made by researchers, regulators, and legislators. The analysis shows that these root causes lead to consequences including the failure of interventions to deliver their intended safety or health benefit or for new interventions to introduce unintended negative safety consequences. Using these root causes, a bowtie analysis was conducted to identify controls for preventing the enactment of legislative or regulatory mandates requiring the use of immature technologies and to mitigate the negative consequences of the enactment of such a mandate. These controls represent a set of guidelines that can be used to ensure that immature safety and health technologies are not introduced prematurely and that future mining safety and health regulations and legislation are as effective as possible at protecting the safety and health of miners. The implementation of these guidelines will result in more effective regulation, more impactful safety and health research, safer mines, and healthier miners.