IMARC award winner MOVUS back with bigger story to tell
- 9 September 2026
MOVUS is returning to IMARC after a highly successful 2025 event where it took out the inaugural Mining Beacon Innovation Award and gave visitors unique insights into the future of critical plant maintenance.
Technology continues to move quickly in the field and MOVUS has had a year of important milestones since the last IMARC, as outlined in the pre-event discussion below.
What does MOVUS do and what role does it play in the mining industry?
MOVUS is an Australian industrial technology company helping mining operations improve asset reliability, productivity and energy performance through advanced sensing and AI.
Our approach starts with creating continuous visibility at the asset level. MOVUS has developed sensing capabilities across vibration, temperature, rotational speed, motor current and energy performance. This data can be combined with information customers already have across condition monitoring systems, SCADA, historians, maintenance platforms and other operational technologies.
At the centre of this ecosystem is PlantOS, our industrial AI platform. PlantOS brings these different data sources together and uses prescriptive AI to help teams understand what is happening with an asset, how significant it is and what action should be taken next.
Importantly, we are not asking mining companies to replace the technology they have already invested in. We believe the greater opportunity is to connect existing and new sources of intelligence and make them more useful to maintenance, reliability and operations teams.
Our role in mining is therefore about helping close the gap between having large volumes of asset data and converting that data into clear, timely operational decisions.
What are you seeing as some of the biggest challenges facing the mining sector right now?
One of the biggest challenges is the need to produce more from existing operations while simultaneously improving asset availability, controlling costs and reducing energy intensity.
Mining companies have invested significantly in automation, sensors, condition monitoring and data platforms. In many operations, the challenge is no longer a lack of data; it is making sense of that information quickly enough to influence an operational outcome.
Reliability teams may be managing thousands of assets while receiving information from multiple OEM systems, monitoring technologies and software platforms, often with limited specialist resources. The result can be large numbers of alarms and data points without a clear understanding of what genuinely requires intervention.
Energy is becoming another important part of this challenge. Mines generally understand their overall site or process energy consumption, but visibility can reduce significantly at individual asset level. With hundreds or thousands of motors driving pumps, conveyors, crushers, mills and other equipment, understanding where energy is being consumed, whether that consumption is productive and where opportunities for improvement exist will become increasingly important.
The opportunity is therefore to reduce complexity and help people focus on the assets and actions that will genuinely improve reliability, production and energy productivity.
What technologies, innovations or approaches do you think will have the biggest impact on mining over the next few years?
AI will clearly have a significant impact, but we believe the real shift will be from AI that simply provides more information towards AI that supports decisions and action.
Mining has become very good at generating data. The next step is connecting information across previously isolated systems and using it to understand what is happening operationally, what is likely to happen next and what people should do about it. That is where we see prescriptive AI becoming particularly important.
We also expect much greater interoperability between technologies. Mining operations already have substantial investments in OT systems, condition monitoring, historians, SCADA and specialist platforms. The technologies that create the most value will increasingly be those that can work across this environment rather than creating another data silo.
A third area will be the continued development of new sensing approaches that make previously difficult or uneconomical problems visible. Last year our Ultra vSense innovation combined triaxial vibration, temperature and true RPM measurement to address challenging slow-speed applications.
This year, we are exploring another major opportunity: asset-level energy intelligence. Our FitPower technology is being developed to provide non-intrusive visibility into the electrical behaviour and energy performance of individual motor-driven assets.
The future is therefore not one technology. It is the convergence of better sensing, connected data and AI-driven decision support.
How can technologies such as AI and machine health monitoring help mining companies move from reactive maintenance towards more proactive and predictive operations?
Early detection is only part of the equation.
Knowing that a machine is behaving abnormally is useful but the maintenance team still needs to understand what is developing, how serious it is, how quickly they need to respond and what action they should take.
This is where combining continuous machine-health monitoring with prescriptive AI becomes powerful.
PlantOS continuously analyses asset-health and operational information to identify developing issues and provide actionable recommendations. This can give teams enough warning to investigate, organise labour and spare parts, and align an intervention with a planned maintenance or shutdown window rather than responding after a failure.
The next evolution is to move beyond prediction towards a closed-loop operating model.
The system detects a change, AI supports diagnosis and recommends an action, the maintenance team applies its experience and judgement, the intervention is completed, and the outcome is captured. Over time, this creates a stronger feedback loop between technology and people.
We believe keeping the human in the loop is essential. AI should amplify the capability of reliability and maintenance professionals rather than attempt to replace their operational expertise.
Ultimately, the objective is to give mining teams greater control over when and how maintenance happens, rather than allowing equipment failures to dictate the schedule.
How important is collaboration between mining companies, METS businesses and other parts of the ecosystem in tackling the challenges facing the sector, and has an event like IMARC played a role in building those connections for MOVUS?
Collaboration is critical because the problems mining is trying to solve rarely sit within one technology, one team or one supplier.
A mine may have OEM systems, SCADA, historians, condition-monitoring platforms, maintenance systems, specialist service providers and significant internal engineering expertise, all contributing different pieces of the operational intelligence picture.
The opportunity comes from connecting those pieces.
The same applies to innovation. METS companies may bring new sensing, software and AI capability, but mining companies bring the operational understanding that determines whether an innovation solves a genuine problem and can be practically deployed at scale.
Some of the most valuable product-development conversations for MOVUS begin by understanding what customers find difficult to monitor, what information their teams are missing and what prevents existing technologies from being adopted more broadly.
IMARC creates an important environment for those conversations. It brings together mining companies, METS businesses, engineering organisations, technology providers and industry leaders in one place.
For MOVUS, that collaboration is particularly valuable because our view of the future of mining technology is inherently open and interoperable. No single technology will solve every operational challenge; the strongest outcomes will come from combining complementary capabilities around a common operational objective.
Who are you hoping to connect with at IMARC this year, and what conversations or opportunities are you most looking forward to?
We are particularly keen to speak with mining leaders responsible for reliability, maintenance, fixed plant, operational technology, energy and asset performance.
One conversation we are particularly interested in this year is around energy productivity at individual asset level.
Mining operations may have excellent visibility of overall electricity consumption, but understanding energy behaviour across hundreds or thousands of individual motor-driven assets can still be difficult and expensive. We are interested in discussing how non-intrusive technologies such as FitPower™ could help make asset-level energy intelligence practical at scale.
We are also keen to engage with organisations that already have mature condition-monitoring and operational-technology environments.
One misconception we want to challenge is that introducing a new machine-health or AI capability means replacing what is already there. Some of the most interesting opportunities for PlantOS are actually at sites with significant existing monitoring infrastructure and data.
We are looking forward to conversations about how mines can connect those existing sources of intelligence, identify developing risks earlier and move from data and alerts towards prescriptive action.
And, as always, IMARC is an opportunity for us to connect with other METS companies and technology partners whose capabilities can complement ours.
Can you share an example of a relationship, agreement, opportunity or other outcome that came from your involvement with IMARC?
One of the most significant outcomes for MOVUS was winning the Mining Beacon Breakthrough Innovation Award at IMARC 2025 for Ultra vSense.
Ultra vSense was developed around a practical mining reliability challenge: bringing high-quality triaxial vibration sensing, temperature and true RPM measurement together in one compact device, including for very slow-speed applications.
Winning the award provided valuable recognition for Australian-developed innovation, but its impact extended well beyond the award itself. It increased awareness of MOVUS within the mining industry and led to ongoing conversations with mining companies, METS organisations and potential technology partners.
We have found that the real value of IMARC often continues long after the event. Mining technology has long decision cycles, particularly where critical assets and operational environments are involved, so relationships and trust develop over time.
The recognition from IMARC has helped create that starting point. When we reconnect with people across the industry there is increasingly already an awareness of MOVUS and the problems we are trying to solve.
We are returning this year with the same philosophy but addressing another challenge through FitPower: how to make asset-level energy performance more visible and actionable without instrumenting every motor with traditional power-metering infrastructure.
For us, that progression from Ultra vSense to FitPower captures the broader value of IMARC — industry feedback, stronger connections and an environment that encourages Australian METS companies to keep solving the next important operational problem.
Don’t miss a chance to catch up with MOVUS business leaders at stand F09 at IMARC 2026, ICC Sydney, from October 27-29.
