Susanne Ouellet is a geotechnical engineer and the founder and CEO of Lumidas, a Calgary-based start-up focused on modernizing critical infrastructure with distributed acoustic sensing (DAS), an innovative technology that turns standard fibre-optic cables into continuous sensors.

The company’s genesis traces back to the Brumadinho tailings dam disaster in Brazil in January 2019. That catastrophic event prompted Ouellet to return to academia for a PhD at the University of Calgary and focus on researching how DAS could prevent such tailings dam failures. That research earned her the 2024 Mitacs Innovation Award for Outstanding Innovation, and she launched Lumidas the same year. In January 2025, she was awarded a $250,000 Alberta Innovation Catalyst Grant, followed by $83,600 from the Mining Innovation Commercialization Accelerator (MICA) later that year, to advance her DAS monitoring platform.

Today, Lumidas is midway through a two-year pilot at a tailings storage facility at an active Canadian mine. In collaboration with Teck, BGC Engineering, the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute and the University of Calgary, the project aims to build a scalable, cloud-based DAS monitoring framework. Ouellet shared updates on this project at the CIM CONNECT Convention in May 2026.

Ouellet spoke with CIM Magazine about her research, the launch of Lumidas and how DAS is poised to change mining infrastructure monitoring.

CIM: What was the specific limitation in conventional tailings monitoring that motivated you to pursue your PhD?

Ouellet: At the time of the Brumadinho failure, I was working at BGC Engineering on a project in Canada evaluating potential monitoring technologies for a tailings dam, and one of the technologies we were looking at was DAS, which was an emerging technology. It was ultimately installed for that project.

One of the things that really struck me about the Bruma­dinho failure was that the mine site had sirens installed, but the sirens were never activated because they were swept away. The dam also had extensive geotechnical instrumentation—survey monuments, inclinometers, piezometers and ground-based radar. But despite all this monitoring, none of those methods had detected any significant deformation or change prior to the failure.

That got me thinking about the potential role newer technologies such as DAS can play in helping improve how we monitor tailings facilities. That was ultimately what motivated me to pursue a PhD at the University of Calgary on that topic.

CIM: What makes DAS uniquely suited for next-generation tailings dam monitoring?

Ouellet: We can use the same fibre-optic cable that is used to connect a mining operation to the internet as a string of thousands of dynamic strain and seismic sensors along the entire length of that cable. We can install that at a tailings dam and add a critical piece, called the interrogator. This is an instrument that is able to capture information on any changes in deformation and seismic properties along the cable.

How it works is that within that optical fibre, there is a very thin strand of silica glass; within that glass, there are these very tiny imperfections that are inherent to the manufacturing process. The interrogator instrument injects rapid laser pulses into the fibre-optic cable, and each one of those imperfections reflects a portion of the light. Because these imperfections are distributed randomly, they create a unique optical fingerprint along the entire length of the cable. By injecting thousands of pulses of light, we can get information on any small changes at multiple locations all along the length of that cable, which can extend over tens of kilometres.

In that [BGC Engineering] project I was involved with in 2019, we used DAS as a tripwire system. If the cable broke, we would have the exact time and location of that break. But we weren’t using the technology to its full potential; it was still an area of research.

If you think of the cable as a string of seismic sensors, this means we can apply geophysical methods like coda wave interferometry to listen to ambient noise as a passive seismic technique. By correlating data from different locations along the cable, we can reconstruct the response of the medium, allowing us to map how the ground behaves below the fibre. My PhD research, and the work others have done in this area, shows it is possible to apply this level of sophisticated monitoring specifically for early warning of landslides and tailings monitoring.

CIM: Did your perspective on what DAS could do shift at any point during your research?

Ouellet: Initially, I was very focused on the seismic monitoring capabilities of DAS and working out some of the challenges, but as part of my Mitacs PhD research, I spent some time with Luna Innovations (OptaSense) at its California office in February 2023 to collaborate more closely. OptaSense shared a DAS dataset from a slow-moving landslide that it had acquired in collaboration with researchers from the British Geological Survey. As this was a very well-studied landslide, we had a lot of information to work with. Through that collaboration, we applied a different processing technique on the data to look at the deformation along the fibre-optic cable rather than applying the seismic processing that I had been doing previously.

With that low-frequency processing, it was really exciting because we were able to resolve these extremely small changes. The magnitude of the changes was on the order of nanometres per second, so very, very small. We were able to observe these processes and interpret these changes in a way that aligned with the landslide movement.

We could see, for example, the exact moment when the strain started to increase at a specific location. We could observe the movement, or retrogression, as the strain along the fibre propagated upward towards the scarp. We could also see more dynamic movements in this flow-dominant zone, near the toe of the landslide. So we were resolving deformation at nanostrain amplitudes with continuous spatial coverage along the slope—a combination of sensitivity and distribution that conventional geotechnical instrumentation cannot match.

CIM: So that level of sensitivity allows you to detect instability earlier than conventional monitoring systems?

Ouellet: Yes. Because we were resolving deformation at the nanostrain level and sampling the data once every minute, we were able to detect very subtle changes in strain as they began to develop.

CIM: Was that the moment you began to see the commercial potential of this research?

Ouellet: Yes, this finding was ultimately what motivated me to start thinking more seriously about starting a business. I was thinking more and more about the capabilities of DAS and its ability to resolve and observe changes that couldn’t be resolved by conventional instrumentation.

CIM: What are the biggest barriers to entry for this technology, and how is Lumidas making it more accessible for mine operators?

Ouellet: One barrier is that the data itself is very rich in information, but it’s not intuitive or easy to interpret. Another barrier is that many fibre-optic sensing systems were designed for the oil and gas industry or perimeter security—they weren’t designed specifically for geotechnical monitoring. How you implement your system—the cable construction, the acquisition settings and the installation—will impact the quality of your data and your ability to interpret it.

At Lumidas, we are building an integrated monitoring platform that takes that raw fibre-optic data and transforms it into more actionable insights that will help those geotechnical engineers better understand changes in the performance of their tailings storage facilities. We are developing a turnkey solution that supports engineers in understanding which cables to use and how to install them, while providing the automated processing needed to make the data meaningful and actionable.

CIM: Can you tell us more about the scope of Lumidas’s pilot project?

Ouellet: This two-year pilot, which started in 2025, is one of the most comprehensive fibre-optic monitoring deployments on an active tailings facility in Canada. With the support of our partners, we’ve installed nearly a kilometre of fibre-optic cable along the crest of the dam, integrating DAS with more established [fibre-optic sensing] technologies like distributed strain sensing (DSS) and distributed temperature sensing (DTS). We are also integrating that information with conventional geotechnical instrumentation—such as vibrating wire piezometers, inclinometers and interferometric synthetic aperture radar—to benchmark the performance of DAS and understand how it can best complement existing monitoring frameworks.

Along a 300-metre section, we’ve installed three different cable constructions in parallel to see how design affects signal quality. Preliminary results are encouraging; we are already resolving tiny, sub-millimetre strain variations associated with daily temperature changes, and the DAS temperature response aligns closely with the DTS. Using this pilot, we’re developing an approach to integrate the strain or deformation monitoring capabilities of DAS with those seismic monitoring capabilities, and we’re integrating that into an alert-based framework that will help support decision making for tailings [storage facility] operators.

CIM: What is next for Lumidas?

Ouellet: We’re working towards transitioning from pilot deployments to scaling our monitoring solution over this next year and refining some of our processing workflows. We also want to validate the performance of DAS over extended monitoring periods.

In parallel with that, we’re actively working on building out our integrated monitoring platform. This includes automating these processing pipelines, implementing anomaly detection and developing dashboards that can help support decision making.

Ultimately, we believe distributed fibre-optic sensing technology will increasingly become standard practice for tailings facilities with high consequences of failure. Lumidas is building the tools needed to help enable that shift.