Despite the recent advances in mine health and safety, roof collapse and instabilities are still one of the leading causes of injury and fatality in underground mining operations.Improving safety and optimum design of ground support requires good and reliable ground characterization.While many geophysical methods have been developed for ground characterizations, their accuracy is insufficient for customized ground support design for underground workings.The actual measurements on the samples of the roof and wall strata from the exploration boring is reliable but the related holes are far apart, thus unsuitable for design purposes.The best source of information could be the geological back mapping of the roof and walls, but this is both disruptive to mining operations, and provided information is only from rock surface.Interpretation of the data obtained from roof bolt drilling can offer a good and reliable source of information that can be used for ground characterization for use in ground support design and evaluation.This paper offers a brief review of the mine roof characterization methods,followed by introduction and discussion of the roof characterization methods by instrumented roofbolters.Abriefoverview of the results of the preliminary study and initial testing on an instrumented drills and summary of the suggested improvements will be discussed in this paper.