The Barcelona Provincial Council will test some eight smart buoys to increase safety on beaches that do not have a rescue and lifeguard service. Initially, five will be installed in the municipality of Sitges (Garraf) and three in Sant Pol de Mar (Maresme), which will use the system to monitor the state of the sea during the bathing season.
Some 12,000 euros will be allocated, which are part of a package of more than 900,000 that will be used for actions related to drought, but also to promote health habits in relation to sun exposure.
This innovative project is based on a signaling system with beaconing buoys that delimit the safe bathing and navigation area. Sensors are inserted into the yellow buoys, located 200 meters from the coastline, which analyze the state of the sea in real time and a series of environmental parameters, such as day, position, temperature, wave height and origin , and the direction of the current, among others.
From here, it classifies the danger of the wave based on its height and the system automatically determines if the bath is suitable. It is not when the wave is higher than 1.8 or 2 meters.
The system has a web portal for monitoring and configuration. Also with an app that will transmit the data in real time to the mobile devices of municipal staff. In this way, the participating city councils will be able to decide how they transfer the information to the municipal web pages.
The device makes it possible to provide Town Halls with precise and systematic information on the state of the sea on unsupervised beaches, since lifeguard services usually obtain it visually and with little objectification. Once the bathing season is over, the usefulness of this system will be evaluated for the Town Halls, lifeguard services and citizens.
After the evaluation, the future expansion of the project to other beaches on the Barcelona coast will be determined, if necessary. The project, called Douglas, led by the company Ona Safe
