A multidisciplinary team of researchers from Campus Gandia of the Universitat Politècnica de València is partnering with the Valencian Agency of Tourism to implement an environmental monitoring project for the beaches of the Valencian Community, which will serve both to improve the service and to obtain information from users. The research team proceeds from the major areas of knowledge that Campus Gandia Campus specializes in: Tourism, Telecommunications, Interactive Technologies, Environmental Sciences and Communication.
The project is funded through the collaboration agreement signed between the Valencian Agency of Tourism and the Universitat Politècnica de València, with pilot tests being conducted on the beaches of Benicàssim, Gandia and Benidorm.
SMART BEACHES
The Smart Beach model of the Comunitat Valenciana is one of the strategic projects undertaken by the Office of Smart Tourist Destinations (DTICV). The general director of Tourism, Raquel Huete, stressed that smart beaches “are the ones that will be able to provide better services that are in sync with the demand,” and have simultaneously committed to “working to make the beaches more inclusive, more integrative, accessible, sustainable and provide more advanced services to the users.”
The General Director also highlighted that “the results of these pilot studies will allow us to find out which technological tools should be implemented to improve the beach management and make them safer and adapt them to current and future demand habits.”
INTERNET OF THINGS
The project involves groundbreaking application of technology based on the Internet of Things to manage the beaches of the Valencian Community and designing a low-cost prototype, with environmental power, without the need for maintenance and low energy consumption that will transmit data wirelessly. Once the data has been collected, it will be analyzed to obtain relevant indicators that will enable innovative tourism beach management and offer tourists new information that had previously been unavailable.
According to José Pelegrí, head of the project and research professor in the Department of Telecommunications at Campus Gandia of the UPV, “We are designing our proprietary technology for the sensor nodes based on the IoT (Internet of Things) to develop a non-commercial, low-cost prototype that uses or harvests environmental energy, is maintenance-free, with very low energy consumption and wireless data transmission. The data will be transmitted through these nodes to the cloud-based IoT platform, and from there to the application server. Likewise, a database and applications will be designed to obtain and analyze indicators that are not available at this time.”
Communication and Marketing Officer, Campus Gandia.
Project financed by:
