Book excerpt: Machines increasingly pervade the mining industry, reducing manual labor and raising production. While the use of new technologies such as remote control, vision enhancement technologies, continuous haulage, and automated equipment has grown, so has the potential for new health and safety risks. Written by leading experts from Australia and North America, Human Factors for the Design, Operation, and Maintenance of Mining Equipment covers the impact of new mining technology on human work performance and safety. Ergonomics experts Tim John Horberry, Robin Burgess-Limerick, and Lisa J. Steiner draw on their personal experience to provide up-to-date research, case studies, and examples, making the book useful, accurate, informative, and easy to read. They set the scene with a general, yet fundamental review of human factors information related to equipment. They then examine the physical environment and the importance of key concerns such as vibration, noise, heat, and dust in maintaining and operating mining equipment. The authors expand their scope by examining wider organizational and task factors related to mining equipment, including the long-standing issues of operator fatigue and stress as well as newer concerns such as distraction and information overload. A synthesis of available human factors knowledge and research, the book describes human factors principles applied to mining equipment from a multidisciplinary perspective and combines it into one volume. The authors combine their in-the-trenches experience and academic expertise to present a treatment that balances breadth with depth. The book supplies a much-needed overview of the human element in the journey to optimal equipment design of mining equipment.