Mine rescue operations are frequently conducted in hazardous underground environments characterized by damaged infrastructure, unstable communications, heat stress, and hypoxia risk, all of which threaten the safety of rescue personnel. To address these challenges, this study proposes a prototype-oriented mine-rescue monitoring framework that combines a Wi-Fi/optical-fiber communication architecture with flexible wearable sensing modules for physiological monitoring. The communication design employs Wi-Fi for local wireless data aggregation and optical fiber for reliable long-distance backhaul to the surface command side. For wearable monitoring, two flexible sensing modules were developed: a temperature sensor based on a polyaniline/graphene–polyvinyl butyral composite film and a PPG-oriented flexible optoelectronic module based on an ITO/Ag/ITO multilayer transparent electrode structure. Experimental results show that the temperature sensor exhibits a clear temperature-dependent resistance response within the tested range, while the optoelectronic module demonstrates low sheet resistance and acceptable electrical continuity under repeated bending. These results provide preliminary support for combining hybrid underground communication architecture with flexible wearable sensing components in mine-rescue scenarios. However, the present work remains at the stage of architecture design and component-level validation, and full end-to-end system verification under simulated or field rescue conditions will be the focus of future studies.
Wang et al. (2026) studied this question.